He is alive (and he is alive, too) - Rage Against The Minivan

Easter Sunday was a little different for us this year. It’s the one holiday we usually host at our house along with Mark’s extended family. But Mark is currently in Peru on his mid-life motorcycle bromance adventure with these guys:

(cue joke about the movie Wild Hogs)

Mark’s family is out of town, so it was just me and the kids . . . all weekend. With lots and lots of expectations. And lots and lots of things needing to be decided and purchased for the new house. I actually spent 3 hours at Home Depot on Saturday just ordering doors. Not even fancy ones.

Current house status: hot mess.

Future of the fireplace: undecided.

The kids kept asking who was coming over for Easter and when I told them it was just us, it was clear that was a very unsatisfactory answer. So I felt a lot of pressure to keep the day fun and busy and distracted, since all of us were missing Mark.

We did their Easter baskets, the contents of which I ordered on Amazon Prime last week. A couple books, some pens, a soda and a package of Peeps each. They were stoked.

They also got some new Easter clothes. Thank you Tea Collection!

I didn’t feel like braving the mega-church-in-a-concert-stadium scene by myself so we rode our bikes to a little community church near our house, which had a lovely and low-key service.

The church had an Easter egg hunt after the service, which was great because the kids had already expressed disappointment that it would just be us at our house. In fact, Karis had even made signs to invite neighbor kids to our own house. Unfortunately, I was not prepared with enough eggs to hide for neighbor kids, so this community event felt like a win-win.

After church we went home and the kids still wanted to have our own egg hunt. I was a bit stumped as to how to hide the eggs since it’s usually a two-parent affair and then had the idea to divide them and have the girls hide eggs for the boys and then vice-versa. They loved hiding as much as they loved hunting and it worked out really well.

After our egg hunt we stopped by a new house for a thrilling session of measuring door jambs, and then we set off for the beach.

The weather was perfect and they had a blast building a giant “cave”.

Meanwhile, India had new books to read, and this is how she looked all day:

The day was also a bit stressful because none of us had heard from the guys in Peru since Friday morning. We knew that communication would be difficult because they are in such remote areas, but this was longer than we expected. By mid-day, I was starting to panic a bit, but this afternoon we got confirmation that everyone was indeed alive, despite a frustrating number of flat tires (five in two days!)

And that was our Easter.