Easter Festivities 2010

Oh my goodness, I have waaaaay too many pictures!  I tried to narrow them down, but I still have a lot. I'll start with

Coloring Eggs:

  I can safely say (now that it's over) that all went amazingly smooth and even easy this year... no spills

(drop my jaw in amazement!) or stains or even chaos.  I almost mentioned to Blake while we were coloring eggs that it seemed to be less chaotic this year and that no one had spilled anything yet.  Then I bit my tongue till we were done for fear of jinxing us!

I keep forgetting to post that Nathan got glasses about 2 months ago.  He's never home when I think about taking a picture of his new glasses.  So here he is with his new glasses.

You have to hold your tongue just right to get the best color!

Elizabeth was THRILLED that her egg was PINK!

 Caleb wasn't very interested in coloring eggs and instead played with his new race track the whole time.  I think that's why it was so much easier to dye eggs this year.

This is how Blake dyes eggs.  He tries so hard to be excited about stuff like this, but it's just not his thing.  He does participate though because he knows how much the kids and I love it.

 We have a tradition where we each take a color at the end and we all dump them in the sink at the same time.  It makes a really cool rainbow.

Finding Easter Buckets:

(we use buckets instead of baskets... MUCH easier to store, which is a good thing when storing 7!)
Here they all are waiting to go upstairs and find their bucket.  We took a picture like this last year so I HAD to take another one to show how much they've grown. 

And just for fun here's last year's:

They each have a different color yarn and they have to follow it all over the house till they find their bucket.  I'll give my mom credit for this - she did it for us when we were kids, and now we've carried on the tradition. 

Anna found hers in the bathtub.  But it turns out mom got confused and it was Elizabeth's bucket in the shower.  So Anna had to hunt even harder for her bucket.

Caleb didn't really know what was going on and wouldn't come upstairs.  I kept calling him and he refused to come up.  So I finally looked downstairs I found this... Nathan left a trail of Teddy Grahams to lure him up the stairs!

And yes, "Sterling" is in the picture.  Blake says that the vacuum is the "10th member of the family" because it's always out and always ends up in pictures.  He has named it "Sterling" because I LOVE the name Sterling, and I tried so hard to use it as Caleb's middle name... Caleb Isaac Sterling.  Isn't that just so handsome?  How dare Blake defile such a lovely name by using it on the vacuum!  But here's a picture of Sterling enjoying Easter with us, so I guess he's right (as much as I hate to admit it).

 "Huh?  What's THIS?!"

 Caleb LOVED the string!!!!!

  Until he found his bucket hiding in his bed and noticed that there were lots of new BIG TRUCKS!

 You can see him saying "Semi Truck" her:

 "Get it out Mommy!"

 Katie found her bucket.  She was happy, but doesn't look like it here.

Caleb liked Katie's candy:

 Michael found his:

And I tricked Anna yet again and tied the end of her string to the MOP bucket.  She thought that was hilarious!!!  Her bucket wasn't very far away though so she found it quickly after that.

 The whole family examining their loot.

And their buckets before hiding:

Caleb's new semi truck:

He immediately assumed the "semi truck playing position":

And Daddy joined in the fun and played with the new fire truck.

Our kids have never had Peeps and luckily never knew what they were... till this year.  Blake and I both got Peeps in our Easter baskets every year and we both really don't like  them.  We thought we could just eliminate that tradition, but the kids were curious what they were, so I bought them some.  Sadly, they LOVED them!  (Well, Elizabeth only likes the EARS!)

Next... Finding of the Eggs: 

Michael, Anna and Elizabeth were too fast for my camera.

There was one in the shower and Katie thought that was pretty funny!

Caleb was pretty pleased with himself when he found a WHOLE BUNCH OF EGGS!!! (Yeah, these are the eggs the kids already found!)  He kept taking them and saying, "I found an egg!"

 And last, a few more pictures that I thought were cute.