Easter

Easter here is celebrated like Christmas... way over the top... and I don't mean aisles of plastics eggs and chocolate bunnies at the stores. As I write, music is blaring in our neighborhood.... like it has been since Thursday night. The big thing here is CAMPING... churches camp for Easter.... starting Friday all the way until Sunday morning, everyone camps out on the front lawn of the church. It's supposedly a time to study the Crucifixion story in depth and there's lots of activities planned.... but sounded like a great way to get malaria. :) Fortunately for us our church only allowed children older than 4th grade to camp, so we had to miss out! Saturday night most of the activities take place... people march down the main street of town singing and carrying the Cross all night and then at our church there was an Easter egg hunt (they don't have plastic eggs so only use hard-boiled)... the egg hunt was at 5 a.m. Sunday morning!

We decided to bite the bullet and spend this Easter with our local church. Kinda. I think we actually missed all the good stuff (like camping and parading through town)... but we did make it to Easter service there Sunday morning... which was kinda anti-climatic as everyone was exhausted from staying up all night! :) I had really wanted to celebrate Easter in English so VERY early we got up Sunday morning and lugged the boys up the hill to the international church to the sunrise service and breakfast. It was way fun, even though we got rained out and had to move indoors half-way through - still nice to sing in English and lots of yummy food. The boys were hard to wake up but lots of their friends were there and they thought it was great fun to have church outside so they did great.


We then went directly to our local church.... I had a bag packed with new trinkets and Easter eggs filled with snacks and coloring pages. They told us that the service (which started at seven) would last all morning followed by a luncheon! (Yes, crazy.) But it ended by 9:30 and there were just snacks.... dried green peas in warm milk (NASTY, but the boys LOVED it) and donuts. So we were home and in veg mode by 10:30. :) (Turns out the lunch is on Monday - on "Easter, Day 2" but I think just Brant will go to the service and then maybe the boys and I will go for lunch.)


I hadn't planned on doing anything after church because I wasn't sure how the morning would go and how tired and cranky we would all be from church stuff, so it was a nice surprise that things were calm and we had the day to veg. Unfortunately, I had planned on eating a big meal at the church, so lunch was quesadillas and carrot sticks.... not real Easter-ish but the only thing I could throw together. :) Sunday night we just did pizza (we had a couple cheese-stuffed crust Pizza Hut pizzas frozen) and a movie.

We also finished the "Resurrection Eggs" Sunday night - we did 6 Saturday night with the little boys and it was SO fun. They are all at ages now where they can talk and respond (though Ezra's still a bit on the spacey side!) and so it was fun to talk through the eggs together. It's also been really fun because we just did a unit on seasons in Elijah's schooling so we talked a lot about spring and how everything comes back to life after the winter and so it tied in nicely with Easter - Elijah's now got it firmly in his little mind that we are celebrating spring with the eggs and bunnies and that we have Easter at spring time because we celebrate Christ coming back to life on Easter and in spring things come back to life. So it's been a good way to avoid all the egg/bunny stuff directly on Easter.

One of my friends here in town has a "no eggs on Easter" policy - they do a big Easter egg hunt the day before, but then on Easter Sunday they don't do eggs. I thought it was a good idea and it worked really, really well for us this year. We had a huge Easter egg hunt Saturday with all the little MK's in town - there were about 30 kids 6 and under! The boys had a BLAST and even Ezra got several eggs and was SO excited. Everyone brought lots of fun treats like popcorn balls and cross shaped cookies, etc, so it was way fun for the boys and we just ate and they played with their friends.



Saturday night we dyed eggs... I had a kit from the States, but the boys found it and crushed all the little dye tablets together! So I dumped them all in one cup and we had one cup of nice purple/green/orange eggs... the rest of the cups I used food coloring and vinegar. :) Our eggs here are all brown, so they turn out really nice, dark jewel tone colored eggs...




We had planned to do just a family Easter egg hunt on Sunday, but in the boys' minds Saturday morning was "the Easter egg hunt" so we figured why overload them on egg hunts? We ended up putting eggs in their little Easter bags Brant's mom made them (so cute!) with lots of little treats and gave them to them this morning just as a present and they were thrilled.


So that has been our Easter - a bit unconventional, but really fun. We were so dreading the whole weekend (thinking exhausted, sugared up kids, long church services) but the boys did really well and had a lot of fun with everything. Closing with our family picture from this year....


And just for fun... this was us at Easter last year....