Happy Easter!

[As a side note: This is one of the best pictures I have ever gotten of Aly! It is so difficult to get a good picture of her because she is always moving or trying to be silly. I just happened to get this right when she was taking the bucket off her head and she was smiling! Getting this picture totally made my day! You can see the before shots of this picture below. Now on to the post...]

We had a nice, pretty laid back, Easter weekend. It was just our little family for most of the weekend festivities, which was nice, but we definitely missed having family around during the holiday. On Saturday night we dyed Easter eggs, which I think is one of our very favorite holiday traditions. It is something I loved to do when I was a girl, and something my girls love to do now! They just like anything that has to do with eggs in general. Late Saturday night my Grandma Olsen and Aunt Sarah came to stay at our place for the night. It was great to have them there for our Easter morning fun!

Easter morning the girls each had a basket on the kitchen table, then went for an Easter egg hunt in the family room. This is also something I did every Easter morning as a girl. My siblings and I loved doing this--and continued to do it until we were well past the Easter egg finding "stage". Annika and Aly play hide-and-seek with toys all the time, so they really looked forward to finding candy-filled plastic eggs on Easter morning. Annika just came up to me as I was writing this and told me she found a smartie underneath the couch that the Easter bunny hid "really hard." She was delighted to find a late Easter treat. I remember finding chocolate months after our Easter hunt--and loved it when I did. My dad always hid some candy a little too well. While Annika and Aly were sorting through their candy Tony and I made some Blackberry Blitzes for breakfast. They were scrumptious!

I got started a little late on Easter dinner, so we ended up eating later than usual. My big dinner blunder was substituting some wheat flour for white flour in the rolls and not adding more milk. They took longer to rise and were not as soft and fluffy as they should have been. Oh well, I learned my lesson. At least they were still edible! Don't look too hard at the dinner picture below though, you can tell I was exhausted! But it was well worth it. Thank goodness Tony is so good to help out in the kitchen. I could not have done it without him. He's amazing. We had a nice Easter dinner and Annika commented later that she liked it when we talked about why Easter was so special while we ate. All in all we had a nice, memorable Easter with lots of laughs, smiles, and happy candy-filled tummies.