Easter

We had such a great Easter this year.  We made treats, did art projects, had an Easter devotional each night, dyed eggs, had an egg hunt, went on an Easter walk and went Easter caroling. I was asked to give a lesson on Sunday and enjoyed preparing for it.  (After 2.5 years happily serving in nursery I was called to be a RS teacher the last week of actual church. I think it was time and that it will be a good thing for me) It was such a great Easter season with a good balance of time given to both fun activities and the importance and blessing of Easter.

Easter Devotional
Last year, Don't Miss This hosted a week long study of the people who were with Jesus the last week of his life.  They made seven (one for each day of the week before Easter) 5-8 minute videos about different people and each video included an invitation and a tradition.  We watched one night and completed the tradition too.  Mark and I also decided watching the special witness videos of the 12 current Apostles would be a good pre Easter activity too. So each night after dinner we watched the Don't Miss This video, 2 special witness videos and opened two of our Resurrection eggs.  This combined with preparing for my lesson really helped me feel like I was giving time to the real reason we have Easter, which I have not been as good at as I would like in the past. It was lovely. We all enjoyed the videos and hearing the hosts love for Jesus. I want to talk about Jesus more with Jared and Lydia so they can develop a strong relationship with Him as early as possible and I can strengthen my own relationship with Him as well.

Forget knot bracelets:  this was the tradition that went along with Simon (day 2).  They talked of how he performed a great service for Jesus by carrying the cross for Him.  We tied these to our wrists to remind us to look for ways to serve others to forget not.

Treats: Resurrection Rolls, Bunny Buns, Carrot Cake Pancakes, Homemade Reeses PB Eggs, Bunny Tails and Mini Cadbury Egg cookies. I feel Corona Virus encouraged me to do a little more baking than I normally do.  Note to self:  start halving recipes. Pre Covid 19 we would eat what we wanted and then Mark or I would take the extras to work to share but now there is no sharing and we have too many treats lying around.  That is actually why I made the Reeses Eggs.  I had a conversation at work about them a few weeks before this all went down.  There are quite a few people in my office who love Reeses PB Cups and Jen almost always has a bowl filled with them in her office.  Everyone particularly likes the Reeses Eggs which led to a discussion about the huge PB eggs you can apparently find at places like Amish stores here in VA.  I had never noticed them before but Jennifer and Ricky who are Virginians through and through mentioned them and I said I would make some.  It was sad to not get to take them to work but now I have a great recipe and I told them I will make Reeses pumpkins if we make it back to work for the Fall.

This was a little thicker than necessary but so good.  

Orange flavored rolls with orange glaze added. 

So delicious. 

Resurrection Rolls

Mini Cadbury Egg Cookies

I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen by this point (Sunday afternoon) which I did not mind, baking is my thing, but I happily turned these over to my family to bake.  They made them while I taught my lesson and they did a great job.  

Carrot Cake Pancakes.  Mid laugh photos are so great. 

Mark made the glaze while I mixed them and cooked them.  Sunday pancakes are a weekly thing at our house.  We have them for lunch every Sunday.  I have about 5 recipes I rotate through and we were excited to try a new recipe.  They were good but I am not sold that they should be in the regular rotation. 

It was fun to make favorites and try some new things. I really love to bake.  I loved the how the Reeses Eggs turned out and Jared and Lydia asked if resurrection rolls could become a new tradition which is fine by me.  I didn't think they were that amazing to taste but did enjoy explaining what the ingredients represented in the Easter story and how the marshmallow disappeared.  Their excitement was really fun. The more family memories we can make with them the better.

Projects: PEEPS houses and water color crayon resistance eggs
I have never been able to get on board with Gingerbread houses at Christmas. I have always thought they were fun but there is just so much other stuff going on so we never make them.  I have seen ideas to make Halloween Haunted houses but it also just felt too busy.  Enter PEEPS houses.  These were so fun.  We all had a great time making them and then we let Jared and Lydia eat them the next day for our family movie treat.  It was great. We will definitely be making them again. 

Lydia and Mark worked on the first one and Jared and I did the one on the right. 

We did a few art projects but this was the favorite.

Easter Baskets, Dyeing eggs and the hunt.  Jared and Lydia opened their baskets on Saturday were happy with the contents.  I finally bought a copy of Monopoly for Jared.  A new board game seemed like a good idea for this time at home and it was one that we knew he would love. Lydia and Mark were good sports and played with him Sunday.  I might be willing to play if we set a limit on how long or how many turns each person got.  I have become more and more like my Dad as far as board games go.  He could not stand them.  He was known to say "they are called Bored games for a reason."  I totally get that.  I am a big puzzle person and have been working on one the last week but strategy or just long board games are not my thing. I will play them but I always feel like I should be doing something more productive with my time. Mark is a really great sport about playing them with Jared in particular.

Lydia reading: you can tell she was really into it. 

This year I wanted to get creative and try new ways to dye eggs.  We picked two new methods and also stuck with the standard PAAS kits.   We tried making speckled eggs and marbled eggs.  The speckled eggs turned out awesome and Mark and Lydia managed to make some cool marbled eggs while Jared and I did not.

Speckled

We dyed the rice with food coloring and then placed the egg in the bag and shook it.

 They were so pretty. 

Marbled

Food coloring and cool whip

PAAS: just regular old dye was the favorite but the speckled eggs were a close second because they looked so cool.

Right to left: Speckled, PAAS, Marbled

We hid 12 candy filled eggs for each of them.  Lydia's were purple and yellow and Jared's were green and blue.  They each had one giant money egg with 2 dollars in it as well.  Mark and I felt awesome about our work hiding the eggs.  They were so much trickier than expected.  There were multiple times Jared or Lydia walked right by one of their eggs.  The best was Jared's money egg.  Mark hid it on the basketball rim.  He stood under it for quite a few minutes and walked by it multiple times.  It was a lot of fun.

Easter Caroling:  Mark really wanted to do this.  Jared and Lydia did not.  I was pretty excited to try it out.  We won Jared and Lydia over with the idea that we would decorate each family's driveway with sidewalk chalk before we sang.  We picked 4 families to carol to and sang "He is Risen and Christ the Lord is Risen Today". We went out the day before Easter just our little family.  I printed out a pretty little "He is not Here For He is Risen" quote on photo paper and put together a bag of Easter candy.  The families we visited were so surprised and I think they were really happy to have some visitors.  We stayed a good 8-10 feet away from them as we sang and I think it really cheered people up which was so nice.  The sidewalk chalk was really fun, Jared and Lydia loved it. One of the families works at UVA Health and we were glad he was home so we could hear how things look from his viewpoint and get to thank him and his family for their sacrifices.  I am sure Mark would like this to be a yearly tradition.  One of the families asked if they could come with us next year.  It was a really nice outing and we felt safe doing it.  We maintained our distance, stayed outside and never had more than 10 people.

Easter Walk.  Not only did I give my RS lesson Sunday but I was also in charge of our Family Home Evening (morning for us) lesson as well.  I found a cute idea on LDS Living to go on an Easter Walk.  I read a cute story and a scripture and then we went on a walk with scripture clues.  After reading the scripture to hear the clue Jared and Lydia figured out what symbol the verse talked about and then we found an example of it.  We walked down UVA Research Park and enjoyed the great weather and the last of the flowering trees.

Thorns for the crown of thorns, wood for the cross, rock for the stone in front of the tomb and something living for resurrection.

This was one of the best Easters that I can remember. I think it has to do with the fact that we are used to not being with family.  There was no large family gathering to miss out on. I am grateful we had a great week having fun and thinking of Jesus more together.

Spring Break (Corona Virus Week 4)

Spring break was nothing.  The end.

I guess we did a few out of the ordinary things. We had a campfire one night and no school work was completed although Jared and Lydia did ask to play Prodigy each day and we let them.  They somehow ended up staying up later than they normally do and Jared slept in until 10:00 at least three times so that was something.  We went out to safely see if we could see the super moon through the clouds and were rewarded with some awesome views. This led to a discussion about star gazing so we did stay out to try that too, all by ourselves, we saw on one else.   One day was warmer than I would like so we fulfilled Lydia's request to have a water war and did some water activities.  One night, on our daily mile walk at Chris Greene it was really windy so we stayed to fly a kite and that was fun.   Mark only worked at the airport for 1 hour and 15 minutes Monday night.  There was only 1 plane they needed to land and walk through. We did have a really great week celebrating Easter which was so nice. And thats it. Spring break 2020.

Super Moon

Caught this beautiful sunset while we waited.  

It was such a treat since we rarely see the sunset surrounded by trees as we are. 

*I have been noticing that more of my pictures were more blurry than I like and pointed this out to Mark.  He said that it is because they are motion pictures and he's right! Any time I edit them it takes away the motion so I did not want to edit this one, so blurry it is.

I've really come to appreciate what photographers call "Golden Hour" as we've taken these evening walks.  Its kind of magical.

I also had my first real "How are we going to survive this new normal for 8+ more weeks" (59 days till June 10th, the current stay at home order for VA) day.  It had gotten really hot (but not really, were talking 82 degrees I am a wimp) and the previous 2 days of no structure were wearing on me. Its silly this happened to me because a good portion of my day is still very structured and almost the same as it was Pre Corona Virus (wake up, exercise, get ready for day, work my 4 hours) but I'm better now.  I have seen a few posts about being very gentle with yourself and recognizing that its ok to not understand why you are feeling the way you are and am taking those to heart.  Our life has been minimally interrupted with this virus and so many people are facing real fears and struggles that I have no reason to complain.  I was grateful for the chance to participate in the worldwide fast Friday, it felt good to do something besides stay at home even though I still did that...

Corona Virus week 3 (for us)

Home Learning:
  One day Mark decided to make cookies for math which was well received by his two students.  I posted a picture of it to both Jared and Lydia's seesaw accounts for school assuming just their teachers would see but on Lydia's the specials teachers saw it too and she got lots of sweet comments.  The principal, PE teacher, librarian, art teacher and guidance counselor all requested some cookies.  Both teachers sent nice messages as well.  For our family the teachers/admin at Baker Butler have done a great job communicating with Jared and Lydia and keeping us up to date.  Lydia had a zoom meeting with 6 other students and loved seeing her friends and self on camera.  Jared had a one on one meeting with his teacher and he and Mark talked for 45 minutes!  We appreciate all their efforts.   I know they are reaching out to as many students as they can and that they (and Mark) worry about their students who are in less than ideal home situations.  Next week is Spring break and I think they will enjoy a break.

Trees and leaves
We got our yard all cleaned up! Mark was out splitting logs each day after home learning.  I would join him after work or in the evening.  A family friend ended up taking 3 truck loads and we are still left with more wood than we would ever use.  We don't have a wood burning fireplace so its all just outdoor campfires.  Maybe we can give wood out to people for holiday gifts. To celebrate finishing the trees and get more stuff cleaned up we had a campfire with tinfoil dinners Saturday.  We planned to do it Friday when we finished but there were high winds so we pushed it back a day.  It was lovely weather and it feels so good to have it done. 

The wood behind Mark is 2 rows deep and this picture only shows half of the length. 

After 4.5 years of living here, surrounded by trees, we finally bit the bullet and bought a high power, backpack leaf blower.  Its been on our list of things we should really look into buying forever but we never wanted to spend the money.  We got it this week and yesterday I started taking care of multiple years worth of leaves.  So many leaves.  I have made it clear many times how much I hate yard work but I love leaf blowing! It is so satisfying.  Unlike weeding or lawn mowing which you have to do repeatedly you can basically do this once and you are done.  Its a finishable project and you don't have to be out in disgusting weather to do it.  Its the best.  So I had a great time cleaning up one section of our yard yesterday. I have so much more to do and I don't even mind.  Since we are surrounded by woods and our backyard is basically a hill I am just blowing the leaves down the hill.  They can decompose down there out of sight.

I uncovered this bottle as I blew leaves.  I don't think its a Coca-Cola bottle...

Down the hill.  So many leaves. 

My Dad was someone who found yard work very satisfying and he did so much of it at Green Valley Road.  I thought of my Dad a lot yesterday as I was out working.  I worked for hours and just focused on getting the job done which is how he spent so many Saturdays.  I worked well past the sun going down and just wanted to keep going.  It was nice to reflect on him and feel him nearby.

Walks
We have really come to enjoy our daily mile walks at Chris Greene Lake.  Feeling the breeze off the water enjoying the sun sparkling on the lake, it's been a lovely family outing.  And the weather has been so helpful.  As its warmed up more and more people are heading to Chris Greene.  Yesterday and today there was "security" at the entrance reminding people of social distancing and groups smaller than 10.  I am concerned they will close the gates as it gets warmer because so many people are spending time there and it may be a good idea.  Its a big area so you can spread out easily but there are definite spots more people gather, 6 feet away from each other.  We do not go near those spots but just walk up on the road which has worked well.

This is the hill we go sledding on.  It's sort of funny to be spending time on it now.  

Conference
I really enjoyed the Saturday morning session.  Elder Anderson's talk was my favorite.  I felt much more prepared for conference and am thankful for the invitation Pres. Nelson gave us to really reflect and prepare for conference.  I have come to really love the lessons done by Don't Miss This.  One of the two teachers hosted a special evening event similar to a Time Out For Women called Inklings and it really helped me feel prepared this week.

Inside the house:  We had some recessed lighting put in.  Our house, like many houses from the 1980's has really poor lighting.  So we finally did something about it.  We had 5 lights put in.  Four in the front room and one in the hallway.  We made sure he added a dimmer and love how they turned out.

Its so bright!  And this is only the front 2.