Happy Easter!

It was a fun weekend. I wanted to make Easter a memorable family time for the boys and I think I did well. Friday was about Easter crafts with the kids, although with J's thoughts on anything crafty and E having the attention span of a gnat, we technically only started the process that would last for three days. Saturday I spent over an hour making sugar cookies, shaping them into eggs, and baking them. Then I spent another hour making custom coloured icing (from scratch) with which to decorate them. The decorating process took hours too, but it was so fun I didn't mind all the work. For anyone wondering why it took so long, these weren't your ordinary Easter cookies. They were first painted with coloured icing, and then decorated with dots and lines and whatever else we could think of. They were awesome! J loved the creative process and E even decorated two himself. We stopped at two because he thought the convenient cake decorator's icing tubes were meant to suck dry (the only part that wasn't homemade).

Then we did more crafts and delivered all the cookies around the neighbourhood. J got a little carried away and started giving out cookies to people we don't know, and soon we didn't have many left. It was okay though because it was about the process. The cookies were good too, but none of us really needed them.

We finally finished our Easter crafts Saturday night, just in time to hang them for the Easter bunny. J and E both decorated construction paper eggs and I put them on a string to make a banner. The centre piece was a dazzling huge egg covered with multi-coloured tin foil bits I peeled off of J's eggs from his earlier egg hunt at a local church. Absolutely stunning, if I do say so myself. It's still hanging there because I can't bring myself to take it down just yet. That's not really it; our Christmas lights are still up too.

The egg hunt here was rather anticlimactic. J thought the Easter bunny wasn't making it tricky enough for him, although he passed eggs several times in his excitement. E didn't quite get the concept of filling his bucket (he knows what's inside those shiny wrappers and it makes more sense for them to be in his tummy). E got frustrated and J got whiny because eh couldn't eat an egg until after breakfast, but then he cheered up when we said he could trade half of his eggs for a very cool and coveted book Chima). I even made my first homemade apple pie, and the kids loved it! Husband says he likes it too, although he procrastinated for two days before trying it. That's a statement of his picky eating, not my baking skill.

It was a great family weekend, although I have to say that the anticipation for J caused his stress level to go through the roof. He was up and down all weekend and rather crazy at times. E was just tired. But despite the kids' having some behavioural challenges, we are doing it all again next year. J has even drawn a "banner map" of our house, just so we know exactly how many to make and where to put them.