Easter

I haven't actually posted in almost a week because I have left my previous blog post up so everyone would be able to enter the give away. One lucky winner will be chosen in the morning! It was kind of nice to have a break and just concentrate on getting your emails and comments all straight so I could enter you the appropriate amount of times. That was a bit trickier than I thought it would be. But it was also Easter and I needed time to prepare!!

We had a wonderful spring break just being home and capped it off with a fabulous Easter Sunday. Church was wonderful. It is good to be in the house of the Lord any Sunday but Easter is so pivotal to my faith that I think I would literally cry if I couldn't go to church on Easter. We had some dear friends and their kids over for Easter dinner after church and sat and visited and ate and enjoyed ourselves so much and realized it was about time for the last meal of the day. Times flies!

So here is our Easter menu. Nothing fancy but like my friend said, good food with no guilt! And I cooked my favorite way---no recipes!

Mixed lettuce salad with cucumbers, grape tomatoes, red onion, strawberries, feta and my homemade mustard vinaigrette.

Fresh fruit salad. I mixed in fresh pineapple, pears, kiwi, strawberries, apples, grapes, and a cara cara orange. Those are my favorite oranges.

Mixed roasted potatoes with an herb butter and spiral ham. I do not use the glaze that they provide in those things. Too much sugar for one thing and the ham is perfectly delicious without it.

My favorite balsamic green beans! I blanch the beans and then cook them in a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar with red onion and sliced almonds.

I don't really love my buffet but I do love to be able to serve from it. We have such a small kitchen it is nice to be able to dish up here and sit down plus I had the kids at a table in the living room so they could grab their food and go!

For dessert we had these cupcakes. They were white cake with an almond buttercream frosting and there was absolutely nothing healthy about them. I just like to make cakes and cupcakes. They were delicious!

Of course we had all our traditional celebrations as well.

We did a little Easter egg dying on Saturday morning. This was my favorite Easter tradition as a child. Didn't you love leaving one egg in the dye overnight to see what color it would turn out to be in the morning?

I also had to teach my kids about mixing colors. That was the other thing my sister and I loved to do. We'd put an egg in one color for a while and switch it to another and another and another. I made a pretty stellar midnight blue egg this year that my kids really should have been more impressed with than they were! I would love to have done some natural dyed eggs but it can be fairly time consuming and I ran out of that precious commodity!

This year Evan got picture clues on the ipad that led him to his Easter basket. He found an egg in each location with some quarters in it. Some of the pictures were pretty easy and others we made really obscure. He loved it and so did we because we weren't up late thinking up clues that rhyme!

Faith had her own clues too and she could read them all by herself this year! Thank you kindergarten teacher! Her reading is amazing me!

We always have to have a family photo since I tend to make our clothes somewhat match at Easter and it is easy to grab someone after church to take it.

Of course I have to get the kids by themselves and I usually get the eye roll from Evan but he is coming along and I didn't get that attitude this year.

He is also getting better at taking our picture and not leaving tons of headroom!

We also had to hide a million eggs for our kids. For the record I HATE doing this! I mean it. I despise it. But they love it and I'm their mom. Plus this kid is 12 and he still wants to do this. I am hanging on to whatever innocence I can!

However, I do totally LOVE the smile it puts on their faces. Faith is giddy when she is waiting inside for us to finish the hiding. She can hardly contain herself. She wanted to find this big egg so badly she was telling her daddy beforehand to tell her where he was going to hide it. That girl!

Notice the 12 year olds basket is much fuller than his baby sister's basket. He is usually a pretty compassionate kid but he had no problem snatching up as many eggs as possible before that sweet little girl could get them. He went to grab all the easy eggs first and said he would come back for the hard ones.

Now the only dilemna left is these eggs! What on earth am I supposed to do with these things? I hate to throw them away but I hate eating them when their dye seeped through to the egg making it a funky color too. My problems are big aren't they?

Hope you all had a wonderful Easter as well. If you haven't entered the blog give away this is your last night to do so. I will draw tomorrow morning, April 10th, for the winner. I will try to post right away and contact the lucky duck!