Happy Easter!

Wow. Easter snuck up on me. A lot of "happy"s this past week. I feel like I say this almost every holiday, but it is SO good to have my parents back from their mission. Home is just not home without them. We had our traditional hunt in the Wilkins backyard on Saturday. After so many years of hiding candy and eggs in the backyard, Dad is getting very good at this. (I think we found all of the hardboiled eggs this year.)

Well, my kids certainly loved it as you can tell by their expressions in the pictures. I guess in a way their joy at finding the sweet candy that was hidden was a reminder to me of the joy of the resurrection. The finding of those sweet relationships and associations with those who are "hidden" from us with death. . . does that make sense?

The past few years I've tried to make a push with my kids to celebrate the real reason for Easter with different activities (thanks to Jen Lund's recommendation of "A Christ Centered Easter" that has lots of ideas for activities for various ages) and that has been great. But, this year with Easter coming so fast I hadn't even thought about it until Annie brought home a bunny picture from preschool. I was talking with her and exclaiming "Oh yeah! It's easter! So, you talked about bunnies and eggs?" and she said "Yeah, but that's not the real reason we celebrate Easter. It's because Jesus was resurrected after three days." Well, I can hope she learned that at home but I'm not sure if it was from church or even her preschool teacher. I'm super impressed that she knows these things though. And so this year with our little ones we didn't do as many activities but we talked about Jesus in some of our conversations at meal times and enjoyed the candy and fun of the holiday and each other.

Brad and I went on a date last night and drove by our old apartment in downtown Provo where we first lived after we were married. As I thought back to our life then it all seemed rather lonely without our children. I know they are young yet and a lot of hard work but it IS fun to have a family and be together and be friends. What is that scripture about children being arrows and "blessed is he that hath his quiver full"? That's what it made me think of.