Easter Celebration

Our family got together on Easter and really enjoyed ourselves. This is my favorite holiday of the whole year. During the week before, I went to K-mart and bought more than $30 of candy. I was informed that this was too much so I took about half of it back. We still had about 7 bags of candy to hide in many dozens of plastic eggs.

The ward choir had prepared an easter program for church, but one of the songs, "He is Risen!" was too big of a song with too many high soprano parts for our small choir to perform, so the director asked to have violins play the vocal parts and I play the piano part to accompany them. Julianna, Angela, and Lizzy VanDeGraaf got together on Saturday night in the chapel to rehearse. Thanks to Vicki VanDeGraaf's honesty, telling us that the violin parts needed to be embellished, we spent a couple of hours and created a very nice arrangement to go with Sally DeFord's choir arrangement. The whole sacrament meeting program turned out really well. We had never had more than 10 or 15 people to the practices.... and always a different 10 or 15. But when the choir went up to the stage, we had a very full choir. The whole program went very well and was very inspirational. People complimented the director and music chairman for the whole week following the program.

Just before Sacrament meeting, I taught the 8 year olds a lesson about why we celebrate Easter, and about Jesus' resurrection. I felt like they learned alot.

I got out of bed early that morning and put a roast into the crock pot. I had baked an angel food cake the day before, and after church, the kids helped me turn the angel food cake into my favorite spring dessert, flower cake. It is kind of like trifle with broken pieces of cake held together in this case with a bright lemony sauce which is refrigerated to become like a mix of jello and pudding. It is served with whipped cream on the top. Everyone in the family loved it.

After we made the flower cake, and Marie and JP filled the plastic eggs with candy, Rick and I went outside to hide the eggs and the kids set the table (with the blinds closed so they couldn't see us outside.) I love this part. I get so excited looking for good places to hide the eggs. And I anticipate what it will be like for the kids to find the eggs. I just feel so happy. We had more candy than we could find places to hide so I sent some inside for Rick to hide in the living room too.

We let the kids go out and start looking for eggs, youngest first. Considering that people who were looking ranged in age from 8 to 25, the younger ones really needed a head start. Plus, we hadn't had many serious egg hunts for a few years so the younger ones really were also less experienced hunters. After searching the back yard, we let them go to the front yard in order of who had the least eggs in their bucket. JP got to go out near the beginning because he had been distracted by taking pictures in the back yard. In the front yard, he searched much more agressively. James had a tendency to see where others were finding eggs and then go there, but not until the eggs had all been found. I loved seeing the kids find the eggs. Angie found some up high and pointed and yelled "It's mine! It's mine!" and JP came and helped her get them. John found lots of candy, but in a few days, Angie found his bucket of candy by the computer and generously passed it out to herself and her other siblings. Everyone loved the malted milk eggs. Lee ate his candy almost as fast as he found it.

After the egg hunt, we enjoyed our dinner together and had a short hunt in the living room for the rest of the candy. Each went into the living room individually and got to find 4 candies and then the next older one would got to find 4. By the time it got to me, I had a real hard time finding 4 candies.... I only found 3 and someone had to help me find my last. But there were still 3 or 4 candies left for Rick.

The capstone for our Easter celebration was listening to Marie recite from memory, "The Living Christ, The Testimony of the Apostles, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". She and JP had taken a challenge from their bishop to memorize it before Easter. (see their blog). Marie had gathered pictures to go along with the document. It was very inspiring and a very appropriate ending to our day.