Easter

I meant to post Easter pictures sooner, but life hasn't left me much time for blogging recently. So I'm just now getting around to it :-) On Easter morning, the boys were super excited to come downstairs and find Easter baskets full of toys and treats for them! Thank you to their grandparents for providing everything to fill the baskets with, Brandon and I didn't have to buy a thing! They loved the toys, stickers, books, playdough, candy (although we saved it for later since I knew they'd be gorging themselves on M&M's later in the day), sunglasses, and especially the cherry chapstick!

Then we dressed them in their adorable ring bearer outfits (an outfit that cute absolutely needs to be worn more than once!!) and went to church. After church, we spent the afternoon with some good friends enjoying Easter dinner. The boys even napped in their guest room so Brandon and I got to enjoy the whole dinner without any interruptions! This never happens so that alone made it a very good day for me ;-)

After their nap, the boys experienced their very first Easter egg hunt! Although there were 5 kids there, Jack and Cullen were the only ones old enough to walk so they dominated the hunt and got nearly all the eggs. They were pretty excited about the "treats" inside and quickly discerned the difference between the plastic eggs with candy inside and the real dyed eggs (aka the undesirable ones). After breaking open a few of the dyed eggs and realizing they didn't have any treats inside, they started shaking all the eggs they found and throwing the duds over their shoulder. Then they'd rush off to find more of the good ones!

Cullen opened all the eggs he found right away and dumped the M&M's into his basket, while Jack took the more efficient approach of filling his basket with eggs as fast as he could and opening them later. They're still talking about the eggs and treats a week later, so I'd say they thoroughly enjoyed it!

I'm glad we did an Easter egg hunt with them and I'm sure we'll continue to do it in the future, but I did realize how easy it is to focus on that kind of stuff and not on why we're celebrating Easter in the first place. The boys aren't really old enough to understand the gospel yet but I am looking forward to sharing the best part of Easter with them in the future! I pray that remembering Christ's death on a cross as a sacrifice and atonement for our sins will be the focus of Easter for them. I hope that someday soon they understand why we celebrate Easter and that it has nothing to do with plastic eggs or candy!

Thanks for the Easter baskets Nana, Grandma ("Hamma") and Grandpa ("Boppa")!

Every time they'd find an egg, they'd shout "A blue one!" or "A lellow one!" and show it off

Enjoying the fruits of their labor