Holidays are funny when you have little children. It is silly to take your week helping in Children’s Church on a holiday. Since our church only offers a children’s option during one service, this means that our kiddos were at church for a LONG time and Little had to “help” in the nursery a bit during the first service. They did a great job – I was really thankful for them.

We went to early church, cruised the commons during Sunday School and then helped in Children’s church during the second service. There were chicken nuggets for lunch and the promise of my first brisket for dinner.

I had found the brisket recipe on allrecipes.com and everyone said how moist and perfect it was. I think it was dry and tasted like roast. It wasn’t bad – it just wasn’t a repeater. I need to get my friend Ellen to teach me how to make brisket – she is a MASTER.

Anywho, at 5:00PM (my mom is going to love this story), I realize that I should have already been fixing dinner so we could eat at 5:30PM, but we had been doing Easter baskets and coloring and food had slipped my mind.

I ran into the kitchen. Pulled the meat out of the crock pot to settle, put water on the stove to boil, whipped up a batch of Pam Eyrich’s Peas (you can get 15 oz. of pine nuts at Sam’s for $7!!!!!), and we were sitting down to eat by 5:30PM.

KB helped to unset the table.

Picture a family of five sitting down to the beautifully set table – all dressed in their Easter duds – having a lovely God-centered meal with good conversation and worshipful hearts. Yummy food too. . .

Reality – Half of us were in our jammies. The kitchen was a wreck from my 15 min. cook fest. AND I realized moments before dinner that I didn’t have the ingredients to the dessert I was planning to cook, so I jumped up at one point in the meal, ran to the magazine rack in the family room and grabbed a Family Food magazine I had received from Kraft. I didn’t have Cool Whip but I mixed up some Dream Whip. I didn’t have strawberries, but I had blueberries. AND I just happened to have frozen pound cake that we hadn’t used for Little’s second party. I finished this dessert just in time for everyone to have some and then read that it had to sit in the frig for four hours. I still think there is a show out there that would award me a Kitchen aid Mixer for that super production.

What did y’all eat and who cooked??

I found this great book at Wal*Mart called, “What is Easter?” It goes through all these fun things about the Easter season (candy, bunnies, chicks, egg hunts) and asks if that’s what Easter is all about. The resounding no precedes the explanation of the Gospel and then the book ends with (my paraphrase) the fact that there are eggs hunts and candy and dressing up is fun, but that’s not what Easter is about. “It’s about God’s Son”. There you go. We read this every night leading up to Easter weekend. It was a great part of our prep.

So, Saturday started out with BIG plans to drive to St. Peters for a HUGE egg hunt at the ball park. Two fields were going to be designated for special needs kids and I was thrilled about taking Bubba and Little. We drove the 20+ minutes to find all the parking lots full and the line of people waiting to get it went through the parking lot and down the street for several blocks. We circled and went to another egg hunt. This one was more exclusive. There was an area for special needs kids and the security was great so I wasn’t worried about anyone walking off with Little. Yep, this one was held in our side yard.

“Did you hear me?? I said, ‘HAPPY EASTER!”