Easter Fun

Here's a look at some of our Easter fun over the past week.

Since we were in the midst of packing up our house and trying to sell it, I wasn't able to do as much for Lent/Easter as I'd originally planned on.  But we did get a few activities mixed in last week leading up to Easter.

First up was matching colors.  I saw lots of ideas for matching pom poms into Easter eggs and putting things in color matching bowls. I decided to keep it simple and just have Cooper match the top to the bottom.  I laid all the bottoms in an egg carton and put the tops to the side.  He matched them and I helped him close them and then he put them in the bucket.  

We also tried out this snack mix that tells some of the Easter story.  Since we had so many of the supplies, we took it to share with friends one day and then another day I put each thing in a different egg and Cooper would open them as we talked about it all.  You can see more at the link but the pretzel sticks are for the cross, craisins for the blood of Jesus, round crackers for the stone over the tomb, goldfish because we are to be fishers of men, marshmallows to show are sins are washed away, and we did bunny grahams as a sweet treat to remind us to taste and see that the Lord is good!

We also tried out some Resurrection Eggs that we used several times during Lent and then went through at least once a day last week.  I started with the ones based on this link and then tweaked it a little as we went.  We ended up with 6 eggs

1. A Heart to show that God loves Everyone

2. A bandaid that represents a broken world.  We talked about how the world has lots of hurts and Jesus came and took on those hurts.

3. A Cross

4.  A rock to represent the one in front of the tomb

5. An empty egg to represent the empty tomb

6. M&Ms-- the sweet surprise of Easter is that Jesus rose again and we have a sweet life with him!

Cooper loved these so much.  They did end up causing a bit of a 2 year old meltdown when we shared them with cousin Piper on Easter, because what's holiday fun without some toddler meltdowns!

Saturday we also went and saw the Easter Cow at Chick-fil-A.  We had to be out of our house for some inspections so I had mentioned to David that our local CFA was having the Easter Cow out around lunchtime.  Cooper overheard and spent all morning talking about the Easter Cow.

This is how he felt about her in actuality.  He was excited to see her and talk about her, but didn't want to get too close.  When she went for her break he talked about her a lot but still didn't want to say hi.  Afterward he told us he had fun with the Easter Cow, but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate...

He was however a big fan of the ice cream that the Easter Cow gave us a coupon for in an Easter Egg!

Sunday morning we got up and went to breakfast and then church.  Our church had some photobooths out so we grabbed a few pictures before Cooper went to his class.

After church we headed to my mom's for more Easter fun!  She had an Easter basket for him and he was so excited about all of it!

While we waited for lunch Cooper enjoyed playing with his cousins and Piper showed him a few of her books.  After lunch we tried for a nap, but now that Cooper can climb out of the pack n play at my mom's it's just really hard to get him down.  We tried for a while but eventually decided to give up and let it be what it was.

Cooper's favorite thing in his Easter basket was his goggles that Grandma bought.  He wanted to wear them all day and was a little upset when he had to take them off. 

There was so much anticipation for the egg hunt!  This was actually Cooper's only egg hunt this year-- our one with church friends was cancelled due to rain-- so we weren't sure what he would think.  He did demand to use his basket that Grandma has for him and would not take anything out of it, so it didn't leave much room for eggs.  I decided that was not a battle worth fighting and just to let him be 2.

He found his first egg and just wanted to open it.

We did finally convince him to go hunt for some more eggs and he did a little...

... but once he found the eggs that looked like baseballs and footballs it was game over.  He did not want to put them down to get any other eggs.  He just carried them around while his cousins hunted for eggs.

Overall we had a lot of Easter fun over the past week!  We came home exhausted and ready for a good night's rest, but are so thankful for all of the fun things we had to celebrate that day.