Easter baskets and egg hunting

The kids were excited to find their baskets on Easter morning, though they were good little children and waited to get into them until I came downstairs (the very last person of all). 

Here's Zoë, thrilled with her little chocolate bunny:

Benjamin with his America-approved (ie. meh compared to the original) Kinder Surprise Egg:

Here's Miriam with her candy necklace:



And here's Rachel digging into her basket and uttering a quizzical, "Huh":

The Easter Bunny thought that as a preteen she might be excited to get a loofa in her Easter basket, but, as it turns out, she had no idea what a loofa is. But now she does (maybe that's why she's been pestering us about taking a shower because usually we have to almost beg her to take a shower but on Sunday afternoon she was like, "Can I take a shower? Can I? Can I? Can I?" And we were like, "You just took a shower last night..." and she was like, "Yeah, I know. But we went for a walk. So I'm all...outdoorsy. So Can I take a shower?"). I'll have to ask her how her loofa scrub was.

Poor little Alexander, looking so dapper in the suit that Great-Aunt Susan made for Daddy when he was a baby, wasn't feeling very well, but he was still curious about his basket.

Here's Zoë bugging him (she's always bugging him; if I had a penny for every time I've asked her to leave him alone the past 18 months, I would be an abundantly wealthy woman):

But, he just ignored the finger she was jabbing under his chin and pulled out the contents of his basket. "Bubble!" he declared happily. And that's all he got because he's a baby and doesn't care about Easter yet.

Then he asked me to help him open them, but not with his words—just by trying to open it while looking at me pitifully and grunting. I told him to wait because we had to head off to church.

And then he gave me a big smile and I tried to take a picture of it but it ended up blurry:

After church the kids headed into the backyard to hunt for Easter eggs. We told the bigger kids to leave the more obvious eggs for the littler kids, which they did. Miriam was not very impressed with how the eggs were hidden (she didn't think they were hidden very well) but when I took the kids outside to blow bubbles this afternoon I saw an egg that hadn't been collected yet. So looks like they were hidden just fine, after all!

Here's Miriam (rolling her eyes at the eggs on the grass) and Zoë (frolicking around to collect them):

Here's Benjamin lunging for an egg in the daffodils while Miriam walked past more eggs in search of a truly elusive egg:

Here's Rachel collecting a few eggs from the teepee (I think that pink tree in the picture is my favourite tree this year; I don't know what it is):

Here are the boys collecting a few more eggs from the teepee:

Alexander was rather thrilled about the idea of collecting eggs. He kept saying, "My! My! My!" as he put eggs into his basket. He wasn't very good at keeping his basket upright so spent a lot of his time collecting the same couple of eggs over and over again. He was intensely proud of his egg collecting skills:

Here's Zoë being cute with her basket (and her chocolate cupcake face):

We had our lawn aerated this week, which meant there were little lawn pellets all over the place. It made me kind of sad because our lawn had been picture-perfect prior to aeration. It was still a pretty good lawn on Easter but not picture perfect. Instead it looks like it was attacked by a flock of Canada geese (just saying).

Here's Benjamin in front of that pretty bush:

I've been daydreaming about our garden in Georgia. These daydreams have included pomegranate trees, but I also wonder what kind of trees will flower nicely (crepe myrtle trees, obviously, and magnolias, but what else...). We had a butterfly bush at our Durham house and it was beautiful and attracted so many butterflies (and hummingbirds). There's a butterfly bush in the backyard here, but it doesn't seem to do as well here. Anyway, I still think this tree is lovely, whatever it is.

Here are Benjamin and Zoë running around, gathering eggs left and right:

And here is Miriam running away, from what she swears was a snake, with two or three lonely eggs in her basket (no other eggs had been deemed tricky-enough finds):

I believe that we later had to have Zoë share her eggs with Miriam (which was funny because we thought, perhaps, that we would have had the opposite result—with a bigger child having to share with a younger one).



Here's Alexander pointing out the egg he has in his basket:

Here's Zoë sniffing her favourite egg (I asked her to show it to me but apparently she wasn't in a showing-off mood):

And here are a few more pictures of baby because he's too cute for words:

I suppose I should probably make a note regarding his face, since so many people have asked about it (I sang with the choir and we sat on the stand the whole time and a surprising number of women nearby leaned over to ask me what had happened to Alexander's poor little face). Again, it's not a very interesting story: a few days ago he tripped outside on the cement pad and bit it, hard, so he has a nice bit of road rash on his face.

After Easter dinner, Grandpa took Alexander—who was caked with mashed potatoes—to the sink and he washed and washed and washed poor little Alexander but his face would not come clean! Both Grandpa and Alexander were starting to feel rather frustrated. And then Grandpa realized that he was trying to scrub off Alexander's scab! So he stopped scrubbing.

Here's Rachel:

Here's Benjamin enjoying some jellybeans:

Alexander gathering amongst the goose poops aeration debris:

Here's Rachel poking around some bushes:

And here's a few more of sweet Zoë:

Here's Rachel showing that she found the egg that said Rachel (which she first got at her kindergarten Easter party):

Here's Alexander finding a few last eggs:

And then dumping out his basket as he tried to put the new egg in, and then spending a few minutes putting all the eggs back in, which was tricky work involving so much concentration that he had to stick his tongue out:

We managed to collect all the eggs (minus the ones I spotted today when we went out to play) before the sky unleashed a wonderful spring thunderstorm on us. 

I do wish we could have had a lovely, sunshiny spring afternoon for Easter, but I'm also glad for the rain. Our reservoirs need it, sure, but also rain helps break down those derned lawn cores faster! Haha!