happy easter

I realized today that this was her third Easter.....strange when you consider the fact that she's not even two years old!

She was a week old her first Easter (she's wearing my first Easter dress!),

last year Easter was the day before her first birthday,

and this year Easter falls two and a half weeks before her birthday.

It's strange the way it falls at different times.

The day started with her first ever Easter egg hunt. Daddy grew up having them in his house, so he wanted to continue the tradition, so last night he filled a huge bag of plastic eggs with candy and "hid" them in the living room. Hiding them from a not quite two year old means laying them out in broad daylight across the floor, on the couch and chairs, on the windowsill, and so forth. The trickiest ones were in the back of her car--we had to help her find those. She loved it, though. We gave her her bucket and showed her how to put the eggs in, and she went back and forth across the room, picking up an egg, then trotting back and putting it in the bucket, then going back for another one, and back to the bucket. We laughed at her lack of multi-tasking....she could've put an egg in each hand, but she didn't. It was one at a time practically every time. Here's a rare exception! It took her several eggs to realize that there was something in the eggs. When she figured that out she'd then shake the eggs as she carried them back to the bucket, but didn't bother sampling anything inside. It wasn't until after they were all collected that she found the chocolate eggs and tried biting into the foil to get to the chocolate. Gross. She wasn't interested in the jelly beans--took her a long time to even agree to put one in her mouth. When she finally did she spit it out, tried a different color, spit it out, tried one more color, and gave up. Jelly beans don't make the cut, I guess. Chocolate was another story. She asked for it all day.

Then she got her easter basket. This was my basket growing up, so it has special meaning to me. She wasn't very interested in anything in it, except more foil covered chocolate eggs. I had to show everything to her later for her to understand what it all was. (Note: most of the candy in the basket is for Daddy (and a Resee's egg for me....) and not for her! She only likes the chocolate eggs anyway, plus there's a chocolate bunny Daddy wanted me to buy because he always got one of those in his basket. I'm sure she'll devour that, too, in time.

We went to church and she cried when Daddy left her in the nursery (he leaves her because she does better separating from him than from me) but was full of smiles when we came back for her. This is usually the case, so I'm glad she enjoys it after the initial tears. She hadn't been in several weeks, due to her sickness and then mine, so we were apprehensive about leaving her again with her recent shyness episodes. I'm glad it didn't affect her this week.

This afternoon we went outside into the sunny but chilly day and used her new sidewalk chalk from her easter basket, though she was much more interested in the bubbles I took out, too. We went for a walk and she enjoyed carrying her bubble bucket and pointing to the plethora of airplanes we saw flying above.

The highlight of the day was the "Turbo Tigger" toy--an Easter gift from Grandma. She has been very excited about her Pooh doll in the last couple of weeks and now Tigger has joined the family. This Tigger bounces on his tail and sings "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers." She loves it and starts bouncing and squealing herself everytime he does. I have some cute video of her with Tigger, but it takes forever to load, so I'll have to do that another time.

All day long, in addition to watching Tigger bounce, she carried her "eggies," as she calls them, around, trying to open and close them. Plastic eggs are not meant for two year olds to open and close--she gets so frustrated. But she loved carrying them all around the house, back and forth from person to person and room to room, naming the colors each time.

She had a fun day.