Easter Sunday!

~Easter Baskets~

Caroline's Easter basket was mine when I was little, and it belonged to my mom before that when she was a child! Here they are, filled with a few fun things: jelly beans, Reese's peanut butter eggs, Lindt chocolate lambs, stickers of Jesus and Mary, and new coloring books: Eucharistic Adoration for Caroline, and Jesus Our Savior for Cecilia. They also got a new pad of Color Wonder paper.

Here they are discovering their treats.

They colored while breakfast was heated up!

~Breakfast~

our paschal candle and resurrection rolls

Caroline shows how the roll is empty inside, just like the tomb on Easter Sunday morning!

Then it was on to Easter Mass, which was beautiful, before heading back home for the rest of the day with family!

~Egg Hunting~

Cecilia counting her eggs... one of many times

Did the hens lay any Easter eggs for us?

Caroline finds some eggs and holds still just long enough for me to snap a photo

They looked around the blueberry bushes by walking around them and not really squatting down or looking behind things... "I don't see any eggs!"

Caroline spots one

Posing in their matching dresses... my mom bought them these at Christmas time. There are little cropped sweaters that go with them, but it was way too warm for those, although Cecilia insisted on wearing hers throughout Mass!

Cecilia asked me why I was wearing a winter dress... I was confused, because it is clearly a warmer-weather maternity dress. She said, "It has snowballs on it!" Ha ha!

~Resurrection Eggs~

Caroline opens the first egg, which has a piece of a palm in it to represent Jesus riding into Jerusalem

Cecilia found an angel in one of the last eggs

~Egg Hunt, Round Two~

and they're off!

Cecilia finds an inchworm... just as exciting as finding an egg, apparently.

This was funny... see the egg on the windowsill behind Caroline's head? It took her several passes before she found it!

~And Round Three~

This time, they hunted for the dyed eggs once my parents arrived. They had already changed out of their church dresses at this point.

Cecilia was excited to have found one of "her" eggs... "It's my red egg!!!"

~Dinner~

ham, fruit salad, macaroni and cheese, squash casserole, deviled eggs, sweet tea... mmm, and we had crackers and a cheese ball as an appetizer!

Our paschal candle from this year... er, last year, with the zero scratched off and replaced with a one...

This year's coconut lamb cake

the girls play Duck Duck Goose with Grampa

Happy Easter! Hope everyone is enjoying it!

Holy Saturday - Preparing for Easter!

We spent some time on Saturday preparing for Easter Sunday. We planned to go to Mass in the morning and then have my parents over for a big meal. First, we died eggs. Although I have four dozen eggs in my fridge, I still had to go buy a carton of white ones... our hens lay brown eggs, and I figured they wouldn't really dye very well!

Cecilia enjoyed watching and choosing which colors to put "her" eggs in.

Isn't it odd that in these dye kits, they always include 12 dye tablets, yet there are only 9 spots on the back of the package in which to set the eggs to dry?

Caroline dyeing her own six eggs on the other side of the table.

Waiting for the colors to darken...

And here they are! I thought it was funny that the kit included "teal, denim, and blue." But after pulling the eggs out, it was clear which color was which!

After dyeing eggs, we made resurrection rolls. This has become a tradition since this is the third or fourth year of doing it. I just make a basic whole wheat roll dough and then we use it to wrap around the marshmallows...

... the Wal-Mart brand marshmallows that had already been opened and were in the pantry for a couple months... and perhaps this is why they didn't melt down completely inside the dough as they typically do?

The marshmallows get dipped into melted butter and then cinnamon-sugar before being rolled up in the dough. The marshmallow represents Jesus, the butter and cinnamon sugar represent the burial cloth/spices, and the dough represents the tomb. When they are served for Easter Sunday breakfast, the rolls are hollow, just like the empty tomb!

Caroline dips a marshmallow.

Cecilia shows us how greasy her fingers are after handling the buttery marshmallows!

Now they wait until the next morning to find the "empty tomb!"