When He Paid the Debt We Could Not Pay...

...And triumphed over the grave!"

 

 It's already Thursday so Easter is getting farther behind me.  We had a regular old Easter with egg dying, egg hunting, church, and cousins.  Oh, and as happens every few years, Easter weekend also included my birthday!  This year, it was not on Easter but the day before. 

 

On Friday night my sister and I decided to dye eggs with a Pinterest technique (well, it's older than that but she found it on Pinterest) of using food coloring and vinegar using the color combination recipes on the back of the food coloring box. 

 

 

Most of the colors turned out nice and vivid.  However, you will notice three muddled brown eggs.  Those were supposed to be pink and purple.  Eek! 

 

On Saturday we took Ben to an Easter egg hunt in Grand Forks.  The term hunt is not a very accurate word to describe this event because, as you can see, there was no hunting involved.  The kids were divided into age groups and provided with bags and they were allowed to fill their bag. 

 

When all the eggs were collected, which took about 90 seconds, the kids opened their eggs to find candy.  There were numbers in some of the eggs to correspond with bigger donated prizes, including toys and even a bicycle.  Ben got a number 2!  He had no idea what it meant but I had grand fantasies of rolling a bike out of there but it turns out there were hundreds of smaller bags filled with minor prizes and he won a dollar store pack of bubbles.  One of his cousins who hunted at a later time won pancake mix!  Weird, I know. 

Look at those eggs!  It doesn't look like it from the picture above, but there were hundreds of kids there.  I have heard horror stories about pushy parents and kids at egg hunts but I didn't see any bad behavior here even though a bike was at stake! 

Here is Ben with all those babies!  Tessa is the oldest baby by nine months and still has the least amount of hair. 

 

Here is the Easter tree I was fantasizing about making for myself a few weeks ago!  Look at all those cute ornaments!  My sister spray painted this branch with some metallic farm equipment spray paint she found in my dad's shop.  It was a nice effect. 

 

On Sunday there was a little birthday celebration for my an my cousin's daughter who turned one on March 30th.  There was someone else who would have been with us if he were still here, celebrating his 91st birthday on April 7th...my Grandpa Harold!  We shared many a birthday cake at Easter over the years. 

 

Here is a celebration full of 90's fabulosity! 

 

 

This is from the same day.  See that I am holding an Easter basket in my lovely nautical windbreaker?

 

While looking for some old birthday pictures with my grandpa I came across some old birthday and Easter pictures from the year spent in Yemen. 

 

Check out that cake!  I had that bunny cake many times. 

 

This is an Easter party for foreigners that we attended.  There is another picture of my brother with that bunny that shows it's face and it was a terrifying Easter bunny.  As is whatever that paper plate creation that is on my head. 

 

And there is our egg dying with the dye kit that travelled halfway around the globe to get to us! 

That is one serious flat of eggs!  That is also one seriously bad 1989 puffy paint t-shirt.  Yikes.  I loved it though. 

So that was Easter 2015.  It ended on a high note when Ben threw up all over the floor of the Ground Round when we were eating with my Grandma in Fargo.  Yes, you read that right.  Then it happened again in the car.  There was no buildup and no indication that anything was wrong.  He slept with a wastebasket by his bed and the next morning I woke up to him standing in the doorway of our room with the can saying "this goes in the bathroom!" then he ran down the hall and put it back in the bathroom and he was totally fine.  It was weird and happened at a very inopportune time.  Fortunately the waitress said that her son did the same thing three weeks ago and was very understanding.