Happy Easter Egg

"Happy Easter Egg!" was Elijah's chosen greeting when he called my mom on Easter Sunday. I thought it was an apt title since all of our Easter festivities were centered around eggs. Even our discussion about Jesus and the resurrection came in the form of plastic eggs with an object and scripture to tell the Easter story. The boys LOVED it and wanted to do it more than once.
Anyway, Gina (my sister-in-law who happens to be Jewish) was in town for the weekend so she got to experience Easter for the first time. Our first activity on Saturday was a visit to "Eggshelland". This is a display made entirely of eggshells that a local couple puts up in their yard every year for 53 years running. This year's theme was "up up and away" and featured characters from the movie "Up" and hot air balloons. It was pretty cool. There is even a documentary about Eggshelland that played at independent film festivals. You can see the trailer on youtube here.
They had a really cool flyer with the history of Eggshelland and how many eggs break each year etc. but I can't find the information anywhere online. You'll just have to trust me that the amount of work they do is pretty amazing. Here are my favorite pictures from our visit:


Next up was dying Easter eggs. This took a little explaining this year because Gabe was concerned about the eggs losing their lives. Those darn homonyms make being a 3-year-old tough sometimes. Once he was reassured that we weren't killing anything, Gabe was gung-ho about coloring the eggs with crayons and dropping them in cups of dye. We did have more than one casualty in that some eggs were dropped repeatedly (thank you David John) and had to be eaten right away. Elijah was especially enthusiastic about seeing the eggs when they came out of the dye. He loved all of the bright colors.


Here are the finished products. For those of you who knew Marc in his high school days, I'm sure you can guess which egg he colored.


Easter morning was, unfortunately, a cold and rainy affair (Dear Cleveland, it is now Spring. Consistent Spring weather would be appreciated.) so the Easter Bunny hid eggs inside for everyone to find. David John woke up Sunday morning with the flu but this did not stop him from finding eggs and eating candy even if he spent the rest of the day huddled in blankets on the couch. Gabriel was the fastest at finding the eggs, but Elijah was fastest at consuming the chocolates and jelly beans. Some eggs had miniature bathtub squirt toys which the boys were anxious to try out.


In addition to the eggs, the Easter Bunny brought each boy a bucket with a Curious George DVD a Bible story book and a squishy ball. Here are the boys with their buckets enjoying one of the George DVDs.Since Gina keeps kosher laws and ham is the anti-kosher, we had a non-traditional Easter dinner of pasta, deviled eggs and fresh pineapple. It was delicious and we would sacrifice a ham dinner for a visit from Gina any day. We were sad to take her to the airport on Sunday night. We will miss her and her "eggscruciating" egg puns.