A Family Easter

Our family ended up having a wonderful Easter weekend this year.  I was really tired and on Thursday morning, I contacted my parents and said that I wasn't up to having them come this year.  They live about an hour away and since they don't have a car, to have them come, we have to go and get them.  They also are night people who sleep in, which means that I stay up late but still have to get up with Pk who is disgusting about getting up early in the morning.  Life has been very hard this winter (I hope this doesn't sound like whining but the fact is, I am just having trouble coping right now) and I just didn't feel like I could face having to "be on" and take care of even more people.  Dh convinced me that Easter is a special time and that I would be disappointed in the end not doing anything special.  I relented and now am so glad that I did.  It was a wonderful visit.  Our family isn't big and my brother isn't a Christian so he won't celebrate Easter with us.  My inlaws are a difficult family and we are taking a bit of a break with them (not severing ties but trying to manage our contacts a bit for our own mental health) so we knew it wouldn't be our usual huge family feast.  We made five a wonderful number.  

****Please excuse the text colour and underlining - I can't seem to turn it off.

Easter morning began with a surprise.  I was making breakfast and Pk was wandering around doing her thing.  I noticed things were quiet and went in the living room to see the photo above.  She has mastered climbing into the window and loves to watch the world go by.

Pk and Grandma.  She adores my parents and they adore her.  She also adores peanut butter, which we introduced her to this week.  As you can see, the dogs love it, too.

We did a little display on our sideboard.  In the pedestal bowl are the little candy bags we did for Pk's friends at church.  The palm leaves are from church last week.

Before dinner on Saturday, we coloured eggs.  I just about gave myself a stroke trying to blow the eggs out and dh managed to break a few blowing them out.  Our tablecloth is a bit the worse for wear but it was worth it.

We always decorated eggs as a family when I was little so it was special to do this with my parents.  Pk really surprised me, she was thrilled to do this and was happily involved for almost an hour and we had to stop the activity, she would have kept going.

Since my parents had to go back today because Dad works tomorrow, we did our main dinner last night (Saturday).  We did a crown of lamb (a first for us) with gravy and mint sauce, roasted root vegetables (yummy!), brussel sprouts and beets.  It was delicious, if I do say so myself!

Last night, dh went up to the church building to use his shopvac to get rid of some of the worst of the plaster dust so that we could have our service there this morning.  As you can guess, the building isn't yet finished, no electricity, no plumbing, the only heat the propane heaters that the builders use and no furniture.  It was still a wonderful idea to do the sunrise service there.  We did our service on the empty property a couple of years ago and that was great, too.

Our sunrise service was held at the site of our new church.  The building is largely done but as you can see, the sanctuary is still needing to be taped, painted, the floors need doing and there is not yet any furniture.  Our ministers (that's our minister and his daughter, his wife was out of the shot) did a wonderful, rustic communion service that had a lot of meaning for all of us.

It was a really meaningful sunrise service.  The cross is the farm fencing cross that someone put up on the site that the church is being built on about three years ago.  It doesn't look like much yet but it is going to be beautiful and we should be in in about a month!  Later, we went back to church (in our normal location).

I hope that everyone had a restful and meaningful Easter celebration.