Easter 2015: Part 1

I know I will have more Easter pictures to post tomorrow of a very special Easter for our family, but we've already taken a whole bunch of our easter festivities so far so I thought I'd go ahead and upload and post a few today during nap time.

I've decided that Easter is probably one of my very favorite holidays! I love celebrating our resurrected Savior, I love Spring and the change of seasons (and the kind of freshness I feel in my heart!), and I love all the little family traditions that we've created/are creating surrounding Easter. None of them are fancy but they are special, and I love celebrating this holiday together as a family.

We ate Easter shaped pasta (eggs, bunnies, etc.) with our spaghetti sauce. Thanks Aldi! 

They couldn't decide on one kit so we went with two...
Silly Faces for Jude and James liked the ones you paint with mini paint rollers. 

This was Jude's first year to participate with decorating easter eggs. I think he really loved it but made quite a splash dropping the eggs in the cups!

I found an Easter Story Lego Challenge printable online and we LOVED going through the events leading up to Easter with this resource: we read the story each night, made a scene out of legos, and did a little extension activity (crafts, snacks, etc.) I am so excited to pull this out and use it year after year! 

The Last Supper and The Crucifixion are the two scenes at the front of the lego base.

Making Resurrection Rolls! James: "Jesus is alive. He is risen!"

The Tomb (yay for a wrecking ball from James' construction kit that doubled as a stone!)

We love cutting into the rolls and seeing the marshmallow that represents Jesus is no longer there!

Finished Eggs! 

Our church easter egg hunt is tomorrow after lunch in our new pavilion, but we've always just done a little random hunt at our house with all the eggs we have accumulated through the years. Our yard is muddy (again!) from all this rain so we went the entrance of the neighborhood and just scattered the eggs everywhere. We didn't even fill them! And they loved it!
I originally told them I'd give them a sundrop (equivalent of a dye-free m&m) for every egg they found until I realized that we have accumulated over 100 eggs in the past six Easters with James (and now Jude)! James got 75 cents instead! Ha!

I love these two boys more than they will ever know!

Sometimes you just have to post a picture from this angle to remember what your belly looked like one day at 35 weeks pregnant!