Monday, April 9, 2012

Easter

The plan for Easter was to go to early service and Sunday school, but Jessica and I had nursery duty during the second service. We had the kids who were crawling but not yet walking or barely walking. It was a fun age. Then Jessica and Adam had to go to work.

Jasmine, Kaleb and I left for the beach. They played together so well! And it was a beautiful day too. I pulled them up and down the wet sand at the edge of the waves on this skim circle for a while, and then they pulled each other. Kaleb really couldn't pull Jasmine though. It felt a little strange only having two at the beach with me, but they got along so well it was nice.


Kaleb really did well considering Kayla spent most of the day sabotaging her Easter and trying to pull him down too. I was proud of him for not going along with it, and doing what he was supposed to. He sat really well in church, cooperated in going to Walmart for missing ingredients and helping get things ready for lunch and the beach.


I love how colorful this picture is.

For the past few years we've had ice cream on the beach on Easter. We usually fly kites too since that's what they do in Haiti but not all the kites pieces made it to the beach.






Ready for the flashlight egg hunt. They wear the hooded jackets due to bugs, not the temperature. Kaleb didn't listen to the others and went out barefooted in a tank top and shorts. Guess he doesn't mind the bugs as much.


Kaleb quickly became unhappy with the egg hunt because he didn't like having to pick up the eggs. He just wanted someone to feed him candy. He did the same thing the last two years during the daytime egg hunts we had just for the twins. He wants the candy but doesn't want to walk around picking up eggs. We don't make anyone do the egg hunts of course so we all gave him the choice to take the one egg he'd found and go inside or stay out and help find eggs and split them evenly with the other kids. We even left some right out in the open this year since the twins were doing the flashlight hunt with the bigger kids.


He chose to go in but was not very happy about it. But the other egg hunters were pretty up front about him having to help get the eggs if he wanted the candy since he's almost 7.
I normally only post the photos where everyone is smiling, but that's not reality. We see plenty of pouting throughout the week and plenty of tantrums.

After a couple of very competitive egg hunts when Tyler and Jessica were toddlers where they got run over (literally) by overzealous parents and greedy kids, we decided to have our own egg hunts and have the kids work together and put all the eggs into one big basket. Then they are evenly shared by everyone.


It was hard to get pictures outside because my camera didn't want to focus in the dark. The light is all from the flash (or flashlights but not in this case). The only other light is from a street light. We turn off all the inside lights to make it as dark as possible.




Counting out the eggs. There were 140 in all but one came open so wasn't used.

They found 130 out of 140 originally and went back out. They found 9 more but couldn't find the last one. It was easy to see by light of day today. They did a good job because some of them were a little challenging by flashlight.


Last year Adam had to work late so the others saved him an equal number of eggs, but we also had Tyler and Anthony last year. This is the first year Tyler has not been with us for Easter.

It's Jasmine's third or fourth year doing the flashlight hunt. But now they are all old enough to do the night one. So this year we didn't do the daytime one. It's not much challenge and it's not that much fun with only two. Next year we are going to add a few special eggs with prizes. And we've even talked about moving the egg hunt underwater at the bay.... What do you think?

4 comments:

Felicia said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Felicia said...

Sometimes it is nice to just have a few kids along, they typically do better (at least in my house). Funny, we had nursery duty on Easter too. I had a baby sleep in me almost the whole time, loved it. Underwater egg hunt could be interesting indeed!

Kathy Cassel said...

It was nice to go to the beach and leave the one who was acting out behind. There were plenty of chances for her to to fix things and salvage her day but she wanted no part of that. And she does not seem to have any regrets about it because the stubbornness is continuing into this week. She owes me some sentences from breaking rules at school last week (one side of the paper per incident so she could have been done in 20 minutes) but she sits and jabs holes in her paper and everything else, rolls on the floor doing dramatic crying, screaming, trying to get everyone else to feel sorry for her (thankfully that doesn't work because they told her she's being ridiculous carrying this on for days when she could have written the sentences the minute she got home from school last week). She's been so disruptive at school. When she has to pull a tag she goes into a 20 minute fit of loud dramatic crying and screaming. Last time they were taking a test and she interrupted the whole test, stabbed holes into the desk dividers with her pencil, kicked her desk over etc. She's lucky to have gotten off with a couple of pages of sentences.

Felicia said...

Anthony does a lot of the same things. He will take hours to finish on page of homework and then do it in minutes. He spends longer fighting it then actually doing it. He got so mad at school for having to turn his card that he scared his teacher with his anger. That was when I decided that it was time to put him on a mood stabilizer (his biofamily has a history of bipolar). we are waiting to see if that helps his mood swings. I pray that your daughter comes to the understanding that by fighting she is just hurting heself.