Easter and springtime activities

I haven't written for ages because I haven't known how to download pictures from our camera -and my blog has always beeen picture-driven. I now have quite a few pictures, so...here goes:

Our Easter was fun. On Saturday morning, John and I went to the temple with our ward, which was really nice. In the afternoon we had our Primary Easter activity. I was a bit stressed through the week about how many eggs we needed for the egg hunt. It turned out that we had about 40 kids, which was about half the number I planned for. So they got plenty of candy, but I was wishing that I had purchased less. We started with a lesson on the atonement with little symbols in Easter eggs. Then we had the hunt and then the kids made slime. The ingredients were in bags already and they had to squish it up for about ten minutes. My counselors did that, and it was a big hit. It was a very messy thing to send home, though. :)

I was supposed to have all of the locals from my side of the family over for dinner Easter Sunday, but we couldn't get together due to illness. It made me sad, but it still turned out to be a great evening. I went ahead and baked the ham, made funeral potatoes and cooked up some fresh asparagus. We just relaxed and enjoyed our little family. We also did our family home evening then, and it was really nice.

Our tradition is that we keep Sunday about Jesus, and then do our Easter Bunny stuff Monday morning. I run to the store very early (and get everything half off!) and hide it in the backyard. John goes to work a bit late, and we do our hunt. We didn't have many treats this year, and the kids got a slightly larger gift from the Easter Bunny. (Well, not Jonah - he's young enough to just be happy with cheap things.)

I wrote a while back about Tori and Eli's swimming lessons. They loved it, so we need to see if we can do that again. Here are a couple of pictures:

John has become the king of square foot gardening. He's read the book and implemented everything to the letter. We had a couple of boxes up last year but didn't do anything with them. I'm including a picture of him cleaning those out and getting them ready with the kids. He's also built a double one and put up trellises so that we can grow some larger vine plants. Then he built some cool tree-looking things to hang planters from so we can grow tomatoes, zuchinni and cucumbers upside-down. (It's like the Topsy-Turvy or other upside-down planters. But better.) I'm excited to see how all of this works out. We've already got our spring crop coming along nicely. Eli has really enjoyed working with John on it. I'll get some updated pictures soon.

The other day we made some necklaces that we saw in a magazine. They have cereal and pieces of cereal straws on them. It was fun. The kids get so excited about things like that. I should add some pictures of them decorating eggs. We actually do that throughout the year, because they enjoy it so much.

This is a creation Eli made after a preschool fieldtrip to the fire station. (He joined us since he was off-track.) It is the mask and air tanks the firemen wore - made out of Kid K'nex. That is still the toy set he plays with most consistently.

John said I shouldn't post this picture, but it just cracks me up. Eli is hyper-aware of things that are for girls only, but Jonah has no such qualms. He loves to put on princess dresses or super-hero costumes. When we borrowed potential Easter dresses from my sister Kimberly for Tori, Jonah wanted to try them on too. He would spin around, modeling them for me just like Tori did. Someday, he'll join Eli in refusing to have his picture taken in front of a princess castle, but for now, he's happily oblivious.