Easter (Pictures By Gwen)

We celebrated our family Easter egg hunt extravaganza on Saturday morning this year. Daddy stayed up late to meet the Easter Elephant and help him hide the eggs all over the house for the girls to find in the morning. The Easter Elephant is the Easter Bunny's big helper. Since the Easter Bunny is busy Sunday morning, the Easter Elephant comes late Friday night to make sure that everything is all ready for those of us who do Easter egg hunts on Saturday. At least that's the story that Gwen and I made up to explain why we'd be hunting eggs a day early. Really we do it because I like to keep the churchy Easter stuff separate from the springy Easter stuff because it's already really hard for a 4 and 2 year old to understand the Easter story. Throw in a bunny that hides candy in eggs and everything gets really mixed up.

Gwen woke up Saturday morning and was so excited to find Easter eggs. She got Emily up and they both made it downstairs before Jonathan and I were awake enough to realize what was going on. They found their Easter baskets and loved the fun little toys that they got. Gwen and Emily have been practicing for Easter for a couple weeks now. They take turns "hiding" Easter eggs and finding them. It goes like this. When it's Gwen's turn to hide the eggs she puts them all in one place and then drags Emily to them and shows her where they're hidden. When it's Emily's turn to hide the eggs she puts them in the same place that Gwen had "hidden" them and then excitedly points them out to Gwen. I've been trying to show them how to really hide the eggs and tried to play "Hot and Cold" to help them find them. They didn't get it. So Easter morning was fun. The girls found all the very obvious eggs then Jonathan and I had to point out all the other eggs to them. We were done with everything in about 15 minutes. After that we got dressed and went to the gym then went to Lagoon (for the 4th time already this year) and spent a few hours with my sister Linda and her family.

On Sunday we went to my mom's house and all my sisters and their families came over for dinner and another Easter egg hunt for the kids. At one point in the evening, Gwen stole my camera and took 110 pictures. I went through them and chose my favorites for this blog post. There were about 50 of Noah - her favorite cousin.
I'm not sure if she took this one or had Noah take it. I bet Noah did it because she's not so good at the self portrait thing.

Noah's goofy smile. He's at that awkward stage where he can't give you a real smile if you ask.

Daddy.

Silly Noah.

Emily loves to play in Grandpa's big back yard. Sigh. Wish we had one.

I like this picture. Don't really know what it is or why she took it though.

Here's her self portrait.

Uncle Joel. She took about a dozen of Aunt Megan's bum. I think Megan would kill me if I posted those.

Grandma's new bird, Patches. Gwen's the only grandkid brave enough to let him ride on her shoulder.

Grandma.

Emily and Grandma.

It was a really fun night. Except for the part when I couldn't find my camera because when it ran out of memory Gwen tossed it in the next door neighbor's flowers. We did find it though and it was great fun to see all the pictures that she took. I had to leave early to go work a bonus shift so I didn't get to see how the night ended.