Prelude to Easter

Okay, so this whole writing backwards thing is really hard for me.  But here goes.
So, before Easter Sunday, we had a little pre-Easter Saturday celebration with Ryan's family. Every year we go down to the river at Ryan's parents and have an Easter egg hunt and lunch with the grandparents, great grandparents, aunt/uncle and cousins on that side.  The kids love it, look forward to it, and this year it was all that times ten.  As usual, Isabella makes a bee-line for the swing.

Declan, on the other hand, does his greet and hug with everyone. Still Mr. Affectionate, he can love on anybody like nobody's business. 

Hugging Grandpa and showing Poppy (great-granpa) his butterfly. 

The kids played, Ryan fished a little bit, we had lunch and then it was time for the egg hunt. Each year Ryan's mom maps out a hunt for the kids trying to give certain paths to the older kids and different paths to the younger kids.  She works hard for the success of this egg hunt! And the kids love it.  Instead of candy in the eggs, there are coins.  When the hunt is over, the kids count out their money and 'buy' their treats.  Nothing wrong with throwing a little math lesson into the Easter egg hunt!

The older kids are of course more serious about how they 'spend' and 'save' their money.  Declan and Isabella pretty much just wanted some chocolate and jelly beans and were happy to throw all of their coins into the 'bank' just to grab a hand full and enjoy.

After this we left and attempted to lull the kids to sleep in the car and failed miserably. That evening we had plans to go to Aunt Cathy's to dye Easter eggs, which we traditionally do on the Saturday before Easter. The kids were either too hopped up on sugar, or just really excited, because even Quinn resisted to snooze.  They continued to play and run and eat and color eggs well into the evening.  They also promptly fell asleep at 7:30 when they were buckled into their seats and on our way home. I won't even go into details about how the rest of that night went...I'll just say, they don't transfer from sleeping in carseats to sleeping in beds quite like they used to. Bummer.

While I'm on a roll with this whole viewing the weekend from the end to the beginning, I'll keep going with post number three on something really fun that we did before all of this Easter fun.  That and a some more serious words on my big girl who is having some big thoughts. This mama is entering a whole new territory...