A Little Eastertime Jingle Bells

Happy Easter!

When the Easter Bunny visits our house he leaves notes that lead the kids on a little scavenger hunt to find their baskets. So here are pictures of the kids after they found their baskets.

This was our Easter dinner. Not very traditional, I know, but we ate around a fire out in the pasture. The Talbots joined us and we had a great time. The weather was perfect, which is a first for Easter in Nebraska. Here are the kids eating peach cobbler out of cups. It was happy!

Easter Egg Hunt

Cody said this is disgusting and I agree, but the only element that I think he's missing is that it's funny too. Diantha and I hid the easter eggs in the back pasture for the kids. We hid them in waves where the little ones started first and the eggs were easy to find and then it got harder as you went up the hill. Anyway, Diantha hid this camoflauge egg in a lovely dried pile of fertilizer (I'm using my good manner words today.) This was for the older kids to find. And actually the camo eggs were quite the challenge to find. I'm not even sure we found them all.

Here are the big kids waiting their turn to get started.

This was Rylan's first easter egg hunt where he really participated. The first egg he picked up and shook it, then he sat down on the ground and opened it. As soon as he realized there was candy inside he was on a mission. How is it possible that we can think everything this little man does is adorable?

This is Precious

On Easter Jess took Rylan out to feed the chickens. (These pictures are out of order.) I was doing dishes so I watched as they took a little detour to the swings before doing their chores. At first Jess was pushing Rylan in the baby swing, then I looked out and they were swinging on separate swings together giggling. It was so cute. But this grabbed my heart when I looked out and they were swinging like this. You can see that Jess is talking to Rylan while they are swinging and I thought it was adorable. She adores her little brother and she is a great big sister.
Here they are in the mudroom before they went outside. Gotta love the chore boots on Rylan! He loves to go out and help with chores!!!

This was just another cute picture of Jess. She's growing up so much and she's such a good girl. She loves the animals and is really coming out of herself out here on our little farm. She's very conscientious of taking care of the puppies. She makes sure they are safe in their kennel before we leave the house and she really watches out for them. It's fun to watch her grow up.

I'm mostly posting this for our moms. I thought these pictures would be fun to see. This is Cody being sworn in as a chaplain in the Air National Guard back in October. It's still a little weird to think that we are a military family, but we felt strongly about the decision and I feel that Cody has a lot to give in this position. So far he has just attended guard drill here in Lincoln once a month and has done a couple of things outside of that here and there. He will be going to officer training in August for a month and that is the first time that we will spend that much time apart. I guess it's nice that we can ease into it kind of slowly even though his deployments really won't be very long compared to some. We were told that they would be 4 months at the longest so that feels do-able. Anyway, he's really enjoying it so far so I'm grateful for that.

Here he is in his uniform. Personally, I think he looks hot!

APRIL FOOLS!!!!

We had a really fun April Fools Day! This morning when I was packing the kids' lunches I put carrot sticks in some individual size chip bags, wrote and April Fools note and resealed the bags. The kids were disappointed that their chips turned into something less desirable to them, but they were good sports about it. They thought it was funny.

Then tonight for dinner we had dinner at The Crazy Cafe. (All these ideas came from the idea room site and the family fun site.) Anyway, I'll explain the menu later as I loaded these pictures in an odd order. This was the main course. It was the greasiest cupcake I have ever eaten! They were meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potatoes colored with beets on top. I thought they were awesome! (except the only thing I think I would make sure to do next time is to use the foil cupcake liners like the recipe called for. I didn't have any.) Anyway, I used my Grandma Stewart's meatloaf recipe in place of the one on the site so they actually tasted really good. I hope Grandma is proud of the way I used her recipe!

Doesn't that look tasty?

These were supposed to look like french fries with ketchup. The fries turned out okay but the ketchup wasn't very convincing. They were breadsticks that I cut really thin and rolled in butter and then sugar. The ketchup was homemade strawberry jam. Cody made the "McDonalds" bags and it even looks like the grease is leaking through just like it should be. They were pretty cute.

Here is one of the menus. I'm not a fancy computer person so I just did them each by hand and had more fun that way anyway. And, yes, some of the words are backwards. It seemed to fit with the Crazy Cafe! Anyway the "menu choices" were the food, utensils, and drink mixed up and given different names with a letter to go with each. When they ordered they had to put a letter in the box for when they wanted that thing to come to them even though they didn't know what it was. So they ended up with some interesting combos.

Pictures of my kitchen. Interesting, huh? Come join me for leftovers!!!!!

Actually, the brownie leftovers are pretty good. They rest will be eaten at your own risk.

April Fools Dinner

Here are the pictures of the kids eating the dinner at the Crazy Cafe.

Here's Maleah's first course. She got garlic green beans, a fork, and a spoon. She didn't have her utensils for the rest of the meal and she chose the one time she had them to eat with her fingers. Go figure!

Isaac's first course turned out the way Cody wishes he could eat all of his meals. He got a brownie, invisible Kool-Aid, and a napkin. All the sweets at the beginning of the meal!! I think the girls were a little jealous at this point because they both had green beans.

Rylan kind of got whatever he wanted when he saw what everyone else had. Here he is with every option and, of course, he's eating his brownie. He was in heaven!!!

This is when we brought out the second course. They all happened to order the meatloaf cupcakes at the same time so it was fun to see their different reactions. Maleah
got her's with a brownie so she thought she was getting all desserts. She was celebrating. Jess was excited until we put it in front of her and then she stopped and said, "I smell chicken." Then she bent over and sniffed her cupcake and this is the face we got after she sniffed it. And Isaac? Well, it took him a little while to catch on to what was going on. He was just confused.

Here's Jess eating her third course. It was actually on of her favorites. Her only mistake she made when she was filling out her menu is she didn't pay attention and she left out one of the letters and put one of the other letters twice. No big deal except for when the one you omit is the brownie!! She couldn't figure out why she didn't get one until we were almost finished eating!