Easter

Easter is something I love each year. I see it as a Willkommen im Spring.  Yeh, I just threw some high school German at you! Boom!!  Easter in my family, as  a kid, was always dressing up, going to church, Egg hunts, big dinner with ham with the family. But as I got older, it became cooler, more fun, more...........adult.  We started heading over to my Aunt Judi's house in Kirkland. By now, my brother was the youngest at 13/14.  We still did egg hunts, but the eggs became filled with money! Dollar bills, even a $5 in a few eggs, And for my 21+ aged cousins, they had a beer hunt! PBR for everyone(over the age of 21).  

But we always, always, always dyed eggs.  The house smelling like vinegar (Love that smell), newspaper to cover the table, being yelled at to BE CAREFUL so as not to drop dye on the floor.  The usual.  But as we got older we started to have egg contests. Who had the most beautiful, original and ugly egg.  It was wild.  Each year, people became more and more competitive.  Prizes were won!

And last but not least, as we all got older, my couins' grandma started making jello shots to consume after we all got home from church. Yeh. That's how this large, loud Catholic Family does Easter.  Suffice to say, Easter Sunday was the first time I had ever had a jello shot.  What the what???

The past 2 years we have spent Easter up in Washington, but with my brother getting married in June, it just didn't make sense to drive up there for Easter when we would be driving up there in June. So we hosted Easter at our house this year.  Andy's Dad, his mom, her sister, his brother Matt and his GF Heather,our BFF's Rick and Steph and their son Joesph, plus the 4 of us.  We had so much fun.  The rain kind of ruined some of our fun; we couldn't' do an egg hunt in our yard. But we got lucky, the day before Easter, we took the kids to an egg hunt in Durham and it was small, beautiful weather, and we knew other families (twin mommy families) there.

That night we went out to dinner to Sierra Nevada for dinner with all the family. Uncle Matt and Heather were kind enough to give the kids over 150 crayons. Bonus, they played with EVERY.SINGLE.COLOR that night.  They also got a meercat and a unicorn beanie baby and snuggled with those during dinner. Andy ordered a "Deconstructed banana split" The bananas were covered in chocolate and frozen on sticks. He gave the kids one each. They were in heaven!

After dinner, we put the kids to bed and got started on the egg decorating. We may have had some libations flowing during decorating. For some reason I must have forgot to take pictures, or they are on my other camera and I am too lazy to go see. Let's go with the first reason.

We got up and headed to St. John's the Baptist Catholic Church.  We got there early enough that we got a spot in the coveted parking lot (only has 30 spots) so we didn't have to search for on street parking.  The kids were pretty good (we might have used the iphones on silent to distract them).  We came home from church and the Easter Bunny came!

Verona went straight for the eggs. She knew from the Easter Egg hunt that candy is in the eggs. She is a fiend for sweets. Example, we keep (correction kept, we have no thrown it all away), chocolate or other baking candy in a red bag on the highest shelf in the baking cupboard. She would point to the cupboard and say "choco pease" They each got bubbles, play dough, shovels, rakes, play egg glasses, a DVD of Tangled, and more bubbles.  Like I said, it was raining, so no bubbles that day.

Aunt Terri did get them a Little Tikes Turtle Sand box. It stopped raining in the afternoon and they played with that. We now have sand everywhere in the back patio.  I am hoping the neighborhood cats stay away.

Brunch was wonderful! I made 2 Quiche Lorraines, Andy made monkey bread and a strawberry pretzel dessert, Steph made a delicious fruit salad, Diana made our favorite pasta salad,  Terri made her famous cocnut cake, and we had cookies as well. I made Bloody Mary's (I like Bloody Maria's better, thanks to my great friend Shannon). We had a great day. And we capped it off with our Egg contests. The first contest was for the most Beautiful, Original, and Ugly.

 Pretty inventive right? Andy's mom and dad and Steph all had the idea of blowing out the insides of their eggs to make hollow and then decorate! So amazing! 

The last contest was the Strongest Egg contest. All you do is take your blunt end of the egg and tap someone else's blunt end of their egg, and do the same with the pointy end.  It's fun to walk around and try and find someone who still has a matching end.  There are many techniques that people employ hoping it will keep their end from cracking/denting. The egg just needs to be hard boiled, and obviously dyed make it more fun. I collected all the eggs from that competition and made egg salad the next day. It's funny, when the eggs are all blue, green, red, orange and yellow. Makes for an interesting salad.  Overall we had a great Easter and can't wait until next year. Hopefully everyone starts planning now.