Celebrating A Belated Easter With The Family

Our annual Easter trip to Arkansas found us without the company of our 'no longer living at home' children and our grandchildren. So we had to wait until this past Saturday evening for a chance to get together.

I had purchased the Easter baskets for each of the grandchildren about a month back. As always, I made plans to purchase a few things each week to fill them up by Easter. As is so often my modus operandi, the best laid plans...turn out to be just that, plans.

I had purchased the cute little bunnies, a couple of movies and the appropriately colored Peeps to fit each basket, but that was as far as I got before our trip. What a delight to visit Target and Hobby Lobby on Tuesday afternoon and find all kinds of wonderful goodies for their baskets at 50 to 66% off!

Didn't they turn out well? All except the bows. Ya'll I must have a bow tying deficiency. I even bought a book to help me out, but to little avail. My sister ties beautiful bows and makes gift baskets look so easy. I missed that gene!

We were supposed to hunt Easter eggs as well. I even had Jim refrain from mowing the side yard so that we could at least set them in a few wild clover clumps around the place instead of in the wide open. Alas, it stormed all morning and most of the afternoon...so we gave up on hunting eggs and just let the children enjoy their Easter goodies from the baskets.

I had a really hard time getting photos. The house was filled with our crew along with my cousin and her girls and the kiddos could sense all the excitement. Here are the best ones.

Meagan was able to catch Davin as he ran past long enough for me to snap this picture.

As you can see, Brooke sat very still, but wouldn't smile or look at me while her picture was taken. When I finally got her to look at me, Davin ran into the shot and blocked half the photograph! What will I do when all the kids have kids?

The moment just after this picture snapped was so cute. He was kissing his rabbit. Unfortunately, he turned around to face his Daddy and Pa when he kissed the rabbit.

Brooke was very excited over the sidewalk chalk and the candy jewelry set.

Maddux slept through basket time. Once he woke up, he had all eyes on him...but he wasn't nearly as excited over his basket as the bottle that came next. It was Sprout's first Easter at Nonna and Pa's house.

For a very nontraditional twist, we enjoyed an Easter meal of Popeye's fried chicken that Rita and I had picked up earlier on our way home from a baby shower. All in all, it was a good day shared with family and you really can't ask for much better than that.

And yes, you are reading this post time correctly. It is now 3:02 AM and I am wide awake. I will be doling out the eye drops for Will every hour throughout the night. I am reading "Sisterchicks Down Under" and napping occasionally...but if you can remember back to a time with a colicy newborn in the house, you know that it is sometimes hard to fall back asleep when the alarm goes off every hour. At least we are not still on the every 15 minutes schedule! Hope you are all snug as a bug in your nice warm beds enjoying sweet, sweet dreams right now. Gotta go! It's time for another dose!