Easter was lovely with Jack's parents in town. Kent got his basket after Grandma and Grandpa were both awake to watch, and he delighted in opening up all his eggs filled with colored goldfish, granola bites, and yes, two eggs full of M&Ms. I decided the kid needed a little bit of candy, and with all the egg hunts he's attended this year, he's learned all about pulling the eggs apart to get to the good stuff inside. I also got several fun little toys for his basket, including a turtle rubber stamp (he's very into stamping right now), some Elmo baseball socks, a little rolling pin for his play kitchen, and a cute lion soap.

We went to church, which included a potluck brunch and egg hunt for the kiddos. Kent found several eggs in the sanctuary, then got too excited about the ones in his basket to keep looking. I'm sure he'll learn in time to be one of the manic kids who run around snatching up eggs left and right, so I'm enjoying this calm stage. It's like at Christmas, when he was perfectly content with the few presents he had opened at first and didn't seem to feel the need to have more stuff. If only we could all hold onto that "I have enough" mentality, I think we'd all be in better shape.

Kent zonked out on the way home from church, so I put him down for a nice long nap, and then we all headed to the home of some church friends for a potluck lunch. Yes, two potlucks in one day, with a lot of the same people. Louisiana is a fun place to live.

We never got around to dyeing eggs on Easter, mostly because Kent had already painted so many papier maché eggs and they were all the decoration we needed. I hard boiled two eggs, though, and we ended up dyeing them on Wednesday, because I thought it might be interesting to see how Kent did with it. I let him pick the colors, mostly; he chose blue and yellow, but I decided that the yellow needed a couple of drops of green, so it became this really excellent springy light green color. Egg dyeing will be a bigger event in the future, but I wanted to take things slowly with the combo of toddler, breakable eggs, and cups of colored water. Go figure.

When I was a kid, my mom kept a great bin of eggs of all different sizes — some regular sized Easter eggs, some tiny eggs, and some big eggs that she got back when pantyhose used to come in eggs. We pulled them out all the time and hid them in the yard or in the house. My favorite hiding spots were the azalea bush (where the purple eggs matched the purple flowers exactly) and the plastic tubing for drainage that ran under our house and out into the yard... but I think we sometimes pushed eggs too far into the tubing and didn't see them after that. We also lost several eggs in the woods behind our house over the years. It was good fun that didn't need a season. Maybe I can encourage my family to carry on this tradition. I just need to find some huge pantyhose eggs.

Labels: church, family, holidays, Kent, photography

• posted by erica 4/15/2009 09:18:00 PM
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