Easter 2012

We had a few "firsts" this year with Easter.  Now that Bubba is a little bit older he can do more stuff related to the holiday, which is really cool.  For instance, this year was the first year we dyed eggs.

I was going to do it last year, but it got away from me.  You know how that can be sometimes!  I had one of those dye kits that someone gave me his first year and seriously, this year was when I finally got around to using it!  There was a coupon inside for vinegar that expired in 2010.  Whoops!

We've been talking and hanging out a bit more in the past few weeks with our neighbors while our kids all play together, which is really cool.  Having lived in apartments for the longest time, we never really got to know any of our neighbors before.  I like this little sense of community we're starting to build here.  I also love that even though Bubba is the youngest kid of the group, they still include him.

We all got together at the neighbor across the street's house on Thursday.  I'm jealous of her back lawn, y'all.  Ours is scraggly sad grass and lots of weeds, while hers was ripped up before she bought the house last summer and had nice sod laid.  Also, she doesn't have any scraggly evil bougainvilleas, just tidy little flowering shrubs.

Anyway, they set out tables and we all brought over eggs and dye kits and let the kids go to town.  Bubba LOVED it.  Here's his handiwork:

After they were done there was pizza (and Bubba even ate most of a slice!) and they all played together for a few hours while the adults chatted.  So freaking cool.

Saturday night my husband said something about jelly beans and I realized that while we had bought filler for the boy's Easter basket, we hadn't bought a single piece of candy.  Who does that???  So I took a quick trip to Target at 9:30 at night to grab some.  When I got home I locked myself in my craft room and got my Easter Bunny on.

I may have eaten all the blue bunnies out the the SweetTarts Gummies box as well as every black jelly bean in the bag of Jelly Bellies.  I felt pretty bad when my husband went looking for some black jelly beans the next day because I had no clue that he liked them too.  We never bought them before!  I'm so used to being the only one that likes them that it didn't even occur to me that he might.  Whoops!

In my defense, that blue gift bag is filled with candy I bought just for him, so it's not like he didn't get any.  He got a bag of Cadbury mini eggs (I think I may be the only person on Earth that can't stand those) and a six pack of fruity rolls of Mentos.  Again, GAG, but I know he likes them.

I set Bubba's stuff out on the piano so it would be the first thing he saw when he came into the living room in the morning.

I don't think it's good to go overboard with presents at Easter.  I'd rather focus on the Christian aspect of the holiday, as well as the family part because I think those are more important.  I don't want it to be all about the "stuff."  That being said though, I know part of the fun is the "stuff" so I'm not completely against it as long as it doesn't go overboard.  We did the pail instead of the basket again this year.  He got a book of car stickers, a balsa wood glider, a bottle of the good Gymboree bubbles (seriously, once you try these all the cheap ones will make you say bad words), some gardening gloves, and a small Lego set.  We found the die cast Mustang at Goodwill, new in the box for two bucks a few months ago and stashed it away for this occasion.

Of course there were chocolate bunnies.  I think it's a rule that an Easter basket must have a chocolate bunny!  Instead of getting a giant one though we opted for the set of five teeny Lindt bunnies for portion control.  One went into one of my cheese dome cloches with the speckled eggs I painted a few years back.  He got the rest.  There were a few plastic eggs in there with candy, and a few mini-Twizzlers and a couple of lollipops.  The rest of the candy went into plastic eggs to hide in the yard.

Needless to say, he was all sorts of excited to bust into that pail in the morning!  I let him have a couple of jelly beans, but told him he had to wait until after church to eat more.  He seemed okay with that.

We didn't really do a special outfit this year since we have some baby stuff to buy still.  Gotta watch those pennies!  He just wore some khakis (Ralph Lauren Polo, $2.99 at Goodwill), a white button down shirt (Van Heusen, $1.99 at Goodwill), and a mama-made bow tie.  Oh, and his hat.  Always the hat.  :)

This was the first time he was able to sit though the entire Mass without us having to resort to giving him the cell phone to watch videos.  Since he normally only makes it to communion before he gets squirrelly, and since Mass ran a bit longer this week, this is a pretty big deal!

I've been stalking the Ikea website for months now waiting for the crib I want to come in stock.  They have cribs for short people, y'all!!!  Even at the lowest setting, even as pregnant as I am, I can still reach the bottom, which is something I could NOT do with the conventional cribs most places sell.  They have very simple, clean lines and are inexpensive to boot.  What's not to love?  The website said that a whopping SEVEN cribs would be in stock on Sunday, so I checked after church using my phone (oh how I love my phone!) and sure enough, there they were.  No way we were going to miss out on getting one so we headed over that way.

Bubba always wants to  play in the kid's section.  Luckily I've figured out where all the comfy seats are at this point and headed to my favorite to relax while his father watched him.  On the way there, I spotted this little guy:

I showed it to my husband and asked him, "Don't you carrot all?"  He just rolled his eyes at me while I sat down and giggled about how clever I was.  After sitting there for a bit feeling all pleased with myself, I decided that Kelly needed this carrot.  It was two bucks, so how could I resist? He's wearing green shorts!!!

At that point I decided I needed to eat soon.  We debated a few different places in the area where we could grab a bite, but then I remembered Ikea has a cafeteria.  Immediately only Swedish meatballs would do.  We hadn't ever eaten there before, so we figured, what the heck?  Might as well try it out since we were there already.

DUDE.  It was good.  Real food for fast food prices!  They even had dessert.  This chocolate cake was freaking AMAZING.

I live in a house full of lefties.  I wonder if Kelly will be a lefty too?

Bubba ate a gigantic chicken finger, a bunch of fries, a whole bottle of chocolate milk, and a good portion of cake.  Not the healthiest meal, but sometimes it's a victory just to get him to eat anything, let alone a meal that big.  And chicken too!

Best part - they were running a promotion this weekend that they'd pay for your entire meal if you spent $100 on home furnishings the same visit.  We asked what was considered home furnishings and they said basically everything that wasn't food or a gift card.  Our crib was $99 and with the silly carrot, we made the cut!  The entire cost of our meal was covered too, not just one entree.  We got two full meals plus three drinks and the cake! Kick butt.  Ikea rules.  :)

Bubba fell asleep in the car on the way home.  My husband was able to get him into bed without waking him up, so I joined him and we had a nice little snooze together.  We woke up just in time to enjoy the last hour of daylight, which was good since we still had eggs to hunt!

He found them all, with a few helpful hints from mom and dad.  I loved how he had a running commentary the whole time too.

After the egg hunt he wanted to play with his new Legos.  I bought this kit because I didn't want to fill all the plastic eggs with candy.  I saw an idea on Pinterest to buy a small set of Legos and put some of the pieces in a bunch of the different eggs.  My husband also suggested this and I thought that would be fun.  Well, Target was PICKED OVER when I got there and there weren't very many small sets left on the shelf.  Most of the smaller ones were about $10 too, which was more than I wanted to spend.  Finally I spied this little set for $5 that allowed you to make three different construction vehicles.  Perfect!  Sure, the pieces were small, but since he does these with his dad and is past the sticking things in his mouth stage I figured it would  be okay.

DEAR LORD.  There were so many itty bitty specialty pieces in there!  This was so complicated for being such a small thing!  It took them about half an hour, forty five minutes to get ONE little digger put back together.  I could not believe it.

You like how they appropriated my embossing Tidy Tray?  Also, I accidentally bought the mini plastic eggs so they didn't fit in them anyway.  Whoops again!

After they did that Bubba and I made Resurrection Rolls.  The recipe is all over Pinterest.  It's a perfect activity for little hands to do with some help.  It didn't hurt that they had a lesson or that they were very tasty.

Dinner was egg salad sandwiches. Well, Bubba preferred just the plain, hard boiled  eggs with a little salt.  I think we were all still a little full from lunch!

And that's how we spent our Easter Sunday this year.