Happy Easter!

Our church had 6 or 7 (identical) Easter services beginning Thursday evening and ending with 2 services today. They were expecting over 10000 people over the course of the weekend, but cannot house that many. They have to do this at Christmas, too. On a regular weekend we have between 5000-7000 people and just added a 4th service last month. Our pastor has a heart for bringing in as many people as he can to hear the Good News, and it shows. It was nice having so many service options. We ended up going on Friday evening. It was a good choice because there were still parking spots and seats! It was a really good service with a simple message of salvation and God's grace. We discussed the Easter story with the kids several times this weekend, too. They really do understand that the significance of Easter has nothing to do with bunnies, baskets, or eggs. But they do enjoy those things, too!

We colored eggs last night. We experimented a little this year. I read that you can bake eggs rather than boil them to get them done perfectly. I experimented by baking 3 eggs and boiling (bring to boil, remove from burner, let sit 15 min)3 eggs. Both turned out perfectly and peeled easily, so I decided to bake all 24 since that required less clean up. I guess adding 21 additional eggs messed things up. I did everything the same, but the eggs were only half done.      :( Of course, we didn't find this out until Danielle dropped one while we were coloring them. Some of the white was still oozy. I guess we
won't try that again. We also experimented with dying the eggs. Ron read about using shaving cream and food coloring and rolling the eggs around in that. We didn't have enough shaving cream, so he just tried it with one egg. It actually turned out really well and we might try that again next year. We also tried using koolaid packets and water. (We usually use the PAWS kits.) The koolaid colors were much more vibrant, and I think we would probably try that again. We will not try using grape koolaid to get purple, though! The eggs looked black! Tyler thought it was awesome, but I thought it was kind of gross.

Today we went to Mamaw & Papaw's house for our annual Easter egg hunt. Mamaw always outdoes herself, and this year was no exception. It is always amazing to me to look at the pictures from year to year. All the kids are growing up so quickly. They still have fun finding the eggs and enjoy spending time together. The gifts are just a nice bonus. It always threatens to rain or snow, but we always end up fitting our egg hunt in and having a great time doing it. We had a great time today, too.