Pre-Easter Part 2

After the world's worst egg hunt on Friday we came home, packed the car and drove to Tucson.  We unpacked at my parents house and then went to my brother Nick's house for dinner.

He went all out for Good Friday.  He made a restaurant quality smoked salmon that I could have eaten 20 pounds of.

He even baked this bread by himself.  I thought for sure he bought it from a bakery.

Elliott had a good time wandering around the backyard.

After dinner we had fun playing with the black light in Nick's garage.

Michael

Spencer.  He looked creepier on my phone.  You could see his evil glowing eyes, but they just don't show up on the computer.

Elliott

I was the glowiest because I was wearing a lot of white.

On Saturday everybody else dyed Easter eggs while I worked out for an hour.

And then Elliott, who woke up (and woke me up) at 5:50 am and never fell back asleep, took a glorious nap.  

He wanted nothing to do with waking up.

When he finally pulled himself out of the world's deepest sleep he started crying that 1) He didn't want to eat a bunny cake on Easter and 2) he didn't want mommy and daddy, he wanted Gramme.  

Well all right then.  He definitely has opinions.

That afternoon I decided to take a picture of my dad's insanity.

My parents have several large agave plants in their backyard.  One of them started growing a stalk last month.  Once an agave starts growing a stalk, which will eventually bloom, it dies.  There is no way to save it.  The stalk is basically its way of committing suicide.

My dad has decided to fight nature though because he wants to see this stalk bloom before it dies.  However, the stalk got so big so fast (they grow so fast you can actually measure their daily growth) that it was ripping the roots out.  So he built a support system for it.

My dad is crazy.

On Saturday night Elliott was over his extreme fear of the bunny cake so frosting was applied.

After the kids went to bed we got their Easter baskets ready.  They both got chocolate bunny pops, bunny M&M's, bathing suits, shirts, shorts and little grass growing kits.  Elliott got underwear and Spencer got sunglasses.

Somehow as we were putting their baskets together the Easter Bunny was able to sneak in and out without our noticing to hide their treats.

Sneaky, sneaky Easter Bunny!

Pre-Easter

I want to do a brief and very quick post about some pre-Easter stuff before the real Easter festivities this weekend

This kids and I made carrot footprints one afternoon this week.  

This was the inspiration:

And our finished products.  They look nothing like carrots, but, whatever.

This morning I took the kids to Mesa for an Easter egg hunt. About 7 million people showed up for it and the whole thing was out of control.  We'll never do it again.

We got there at about 10:50 for an 11:00 start time.  There were thousands of eggs scattered all over the grass and basically at 11:00 every kid standing there picked up a few eggs and it was done in 10 seconds.

After that part of the not-an-egg-hunt-because-nothing-was hidden, there was a map to follow to go to all of the stores and restaurants in the area that were passing out eggs.  The problem is that with 7 million people participating you had to stand in line for 5 to 10 minutes to get one egg.  We went to 3 stores before we decided it was STUPID and we were leaving. 

We did stop by the Easter Bunny to get some free pictures on our way back to the car.

I'm pretty sure these are police officers and I'm pretty sure they photo bombed us.

Official for 2015

There was a big long line of people behind us and it was hot so I didn't even bother trying to get individual pictures of each kid.  Each year my motivation to do such things dies a little,

I did get some without the Easter Bunny though.

And a selfie where nobody is actually looking at the camera. 

Since we were very disappointed by the egg hunt we decided to go out for lunch.  Mimi's Cafe was close by so we went there.  I had a delightful omelet.  It was the best part of the day.