Easter Sunday

I've never done this before, but on Easter morning, I asked that the girls be fresh and clean before going down to their Easter baskets. It was a really nice way to begin the morning- all showered and hair brushed and dried. We'd cleaned up the house the day before and it just felt like there was room to breathe. Normally the girls are looking ragged and the house is messy and as they get into baskets it just creates a bigger mess and well- holidays aren't the same when you become a mom. 

In between conference sessions I styled hair and we snapped some photos.

There on the mantle you can see some of the items from our Easter advent. We have a laminated page for each day of the week beginning on palm Sunday. Ideally we hang them up day by day but this year the girls were on Spring Break so we were in Iowa City the first couple of days. We ended up doing them by chunks- a bunch before and then a bunch after we came home.

We have another Easter advent that we followed last year and don't have quite down. There's an activity for each day but some of them are really involved and take time. In a normal year, the girls have Girl Scouts, dance and church activities which sucks up the evening hours. We get up really early for scripture study and it was hard to fit those activities in on top of everything. This year we kind of tried to do half on the Sunday before Easter and the other half the day before Easter. It worked OK, but we still have some massaging to do before that one runs like a top.

Aside from candy, the girls get lots of bath bombs in their Easter baskets. This year we added some electric toothbrushes (they are always borrowing ours because they like them better) and I found name necklaces on Etsy. Clearly I am not yet over the fact that personalization was not a thing when I was growing up and I could never find my name on stuff like this. I wasn't even sure if the girls would care but they loved them and put them on immediately.

One of the advent activities we managed to squeeze in was using onion skins to dye eggs red. They turned out better this year than last and this year we actually had the little egg cups which looked so cute!

The weather was so incredibly beautiful after a long, dark winter and I had to take a walk in the gates area of our neighborhood. The homes that line the lake are just beautiful and the street is nice and quiet. We discovered the docks had been places so the youngest three kicked off their sandals and dipped their feet for a little while. My monthly Nielsen family Zoom happened to be right at that moment so I chatted as we walked.

As we rounded the corner to the beach area, we discovered the playground was open and so I sat down for a bit while the girls played. Liesel's had a growth spurt recently and found a lot of the playground equipment is now to small for her such as the monkey bars she used to enjoy. She still found ways to play and enjoy herself but it was yet another moment that reminded me we are heading into a different phase of life. That beach was beaconing and the girls asked if they could kick off their sandals again and get their feet wet. The request seemed innocuous enough so I said OK. It didn't take long for Gita to pick up fistfuls of sand and start throwing it into the water.

Whyyyy???

This girl is gonna kill me.

When I whip out my phone to take pictures, it's always interesting who is in the mood to pose for me. Usually Liesel is but every now and again it's one of the other girls. This time Ireland was in the mood for an impromptu photo shoot and I had a lot of fun taking these with her.

I'm not a professional photographer so I have to play around with settings a bit. The first photos I took of these came out blurry because I was trying the portrait mode on my iPhone and due to the angle of the sun it couldn't focus on Ireland. Eventually I got it.

It's hard to tell, but there was a bank of clouds and the sunlight was about to disappear behind them. I'm glad I got this shot.

Liesel is showing her maturity as she was unsure if she wanted to go on a walk with Mom and then unsure of playing on the playground and then unsure of getting in the sand. With all her sisters having fun, she eventually joined us but she wasn't interested in taking off her shoes and testing out the waters.

She was content to just feel the warmth of the sun of her face.

Her hair looks like spun gold in this light!

Juxtapose that with Sydney's youthful enthusiasm. She was so happy to spend a little time in the sand!

Of course she didn't just dip her toes in the water, she jumped in to see the ripple effect as far and wide as possible!

There was this little trench in the sand and I've seen this camera trick on Pinterest so I decided to try it. From my angle, I couldn't really see how the picture would turn out but after snapping one I was in love. I'd been focusing on the light and managed to ignore the beautiful sky! 

Ireland requested an individual.

We headed back to the car and when Liesel saw Ireland's individual mentioned she would have like one too. The sun wasn't completely covered, and so I asked Ireland to watch her sisters while we ran back.

I'm glad we got this last shot!