A beautiful day

Happy Easter Monday everyone! We had a great weekend of church services, visiting with family, and joyously celebrating Easter. Every holiday is made more interesting by the fact that our children are older, able to understand (and question) more, and participate more fully in the celebration. Gene was intent on going to the Easter vigil at our church, and excited when we let him go with his grandparents (Grandpa Ken drove him, then he spent the night at Grandma Hendricks' house). He's getting so big, and loves sleepovers:) He stayed awake through the whole vigil (8:30-12:30am) and then doesn't remember much after that. I'm sure he crashed hard in the car on the drive back. Brendan and I took the girls to the 8:45 Easter Sunday Mass, and while I enjoyed not staying up till all hours of the night, I think I missed the excitement of the Vigil. We've gone every year since we've been married, even all the years we had a baby, but finally decided to not deprive the girls of sleep this year. Last year NO ONE fell asleep through the whole service, and though it ended an hour earlier than this year (due to the time change) it still threw off the whole next day with tired kids. But, while the Sunday morning Mass was still a great celebration of Easter, it seemed like a regular church service to the girls (plus a lot of flowers on the altar!) and I think they were expecting something more. Especially since none of our family was there, and that's always disappointing to them. Next year we'll have Gene's First Communion (!!!) but then the year after I think we'll be back to the Vigil Mass.

So, here we are today, taking a rest day to get back to normal life. We didn't do any school, we didn't go anywhere, it's been great. We did have an "art hour", and Gene was inspired to have a store outside, like they did last year once selling lemonade and cookies. This time he wanted to sell "scraps" (i.e. pieces of paper that he had colored in about the size of bookmarks). He stared to talk all business-like and Lucy was a willing assistant for him. I'll write more about it and post a couple pictures sometime soon. They're still out there now:) I think they've had one or two customers...