Easter - Morning

Although Easter is over for most families, we have still been doing Easter activities as recent as last night. So, I guess that makes it ok to post this several weeks after Easter.

To start off - a little story: One day, a week or two before Easter, we were riding in the car and I hear Haylie chanting in the back. "He is not here. He is risen." I don't always understand what she is saying so I thought maybe I heard her wrong. "What are you saying Haylie?" I asked. "He is not here. Say it Mommy!" "HE IS RISEN!" I retorted back, like I was still in 6th grade proud to know the answer. "Good job Mommy," Haylie said as she clapped for me. Let's do it again. We proceeded to repeat over and over again until we had James chiming in with his own imitation of he Bible verse (Matthew 28:6, Luke 24:6). Apparently they had just had that lesson in school the day before and Haylie really enjoyed it.

I later bought her a new Easter book that she absolutely loves. We have read it every other day or so since Easter. She loves to talk about how Jesus died on the cross and paid for our sins. Most of all she loves to say "He is not here. He is risen!" Just a little side note, yesterday we were watching a video, and in it the character said "God Loves you" and Haylie said, "God loves you Raider," - Raider gave a half-hearted acknowledgement, "uh-huh." and Haylie kept repeating it until he really paid attention to her. It was cute. She really wanted him to know God loves him!

We celebrated Easter in Southern California with Micah's family. Micah's parents were moving into their new house and we were doing our best to help them get set up. Since everything was in boxes and the kitchen counters weren't even in we never got the opportunity to dye Easter eggs so we actually did that this past Saturday. Haylie absolutely loved it! We did however do Easter baskets and an Easter egg hunt while in SoCal. Here are some pics of Easter morning.
We put these Hello Kitty shoes in Haylie's Easter basket. We had seen them a couple weeks before at the shoe store and Haylie really wanted them. We told her no but Micah later went back and picked them up. She was SO excited when she saw them. She exclaimed, "Yay - the shoes I wanted!" I was so happy that she loved the gift:
Raider got shoes too! A good way to give a useful gift :) He was very excited about his shoes also:

James playing ball with Grandpa:

James loved his new little toy: