Easter Weekend

Easter weekend started on Thursday for us when our youngest niece, Emily, came to spend a few days of her spring break with me and Mark. Emily is doing photography in 4-H so she wanted to have the help of her uncle. On Thursday night, we painted Easter eggs. It was so much fun! Our plan was to take the eggs to Mark's parent's house for our great nieces' egg hunt on Sunday.

Here's Mark and Emily with our first few eggs. We had lots of fun mixing colors together.


And here's Emily with our finished eggs -- the colors were beautiful!



Emily and I made a stop at Great Harvest Bread Company on Saturday morning. We were lucky enough to get one of the last Honey Bunnies. Poor bunny ... he was delicious! His tail and ears were the first to go.

Here is our youngest great-niece, Lily. She is 16 months old. It took her about 3 eggs to catch-on to the concept of hunting eggs. It took her less time to eat the candy inside some of the eggs after the first one opened and she discovered what was inside.

And here is Braylee. She is 20 months old. It only took her finding two eggs before she was running around the yard finding eggs, as evidenced by her full bucket!

After the egg hunt we went back inside for a fun show ... Mark's Mom loves to sing songs with her great-granddaughters. Favorites include "Do your ears hang low," "I'm a little tea pot," and I believe the pictures shows them singing the "Eensy weensy spider." Too cute!

Had to share this photo 'cause Lily and I just match too well! I loved the girls cute little Easter dresses.

The weekend also included a trip to North Manchester on what we dubbed, Nostalgia Tour 2009. I've been wanting to go to church at the Manchester Church of the Brethren for several months now. Everytime we thought it would work out, something came up. After we dropped off Emily at her home on Saturday, Mark and I returned to North Manchester to meet our friends the Osborne's for dinner. It was fun to visit with them and to hear about their trip to Nicaragua back in January. We hope that Mark might be able to travel with Jeff and his Manchester College medical practicum some day in the next few years. We were also finally able to visit KenapochoMocha, the coffee shop that our friends the Chinworth's started last year. Great coffee and tea in a beautifully restored Victorian home. Loved it! Wish it had been open when I lived in North Manchester.

Perhaps the funniest part of our trip was returning to The Treeway Inn, a small motel at the edge of town where we (and many of our family and friends) stayed for our wedding. It's kind of a retro hotel and when we stayed there on our wedding night, we didn't even have hot water! It's something we laugh about now and was a fun walk down memory lane. After attending church on Sunday and seeing so many of our friends, we headed off to Peru to have Easter lunch with Mark's family. We also celebrated his Mom's birthday. It was another fun weekend that went by too quickly!