Easter Eggstravaganza

Sorry for the ridiculous title, but there was so much cuteness this weekend I can barely stand it.

We are about as non-religious as you can get over here, but I LOVE Easter. Maybe it's because it means Spring is officially here, or maybe it's just the candy, but it has always been one of my favorite holidays. It rained all damn weekend, but even that couldn't dampen our spirits.

Our Easter season actually started last weekend when we went up to the city to dye eggs with Lilah. I didn't take a single picture, but Lilah's mom did and you can read her great recap here. I am happy to report that Norah is no longer telling me 'Lilah bad' in the morning and pulling her own hair, but has instead added Lilah to the Elmo's Song song. (The lyrics to Elmo's Song are literally, 'La la la la. La la la la. Elmo's song.' Norah makes me go through 9,000 verses of this and substitute in people of her choosing. Most days we do Mommy, Daddy, Ruby, Elmo, Cookie, Baby, Baby Nor Nor, Ava, Kevin, Amy, Monkey..... etc, etc--you get the picture).

This past Friday we took Norah to see the Easter Bunny (you've already read all about that). Here she is before we went to the mall. Cuteness overload!

On Saturday we went to brunch at the house of some friends we met at music class. Norah and Josie were born only a day apart and hit it off at our very first class. We have had a handful of playdates with Josie and were lucky enough to get to spend the morning not only with Josie, but also with her 10 year old twin brothers and their parents. The twins are amazing. You can pick any country in the world and they can tell you all the countries that border it. Seriously. I named countries I had never even heard of (I was looking at a globe), and they knew all kinds of mad geography.

The boys are in love with the little girls and spent a lot of time and energy designing the perfect egg hunt for them.





It was a ton of fun. Sunday morning Norah woke up to her Elmo basket (thanks, Grams) stuffed with re-gifted treasures (at this age--and honestly, probably for the next 10 years--I see no need to buy more stuff to make holidays special. She had enough bubbles, stickers, sidewalk chalk, bouncy balls, and unopened watercolors laying around to make an awesome basket without buying a single new thing).

So creepy! She LOVES it.

She hunted eggs for the next 20 minutes or so and loved every minute of it. As soon as she would find one she would scream, 'EGGY!' and then put it right back and make me or BVZ 'find' it again.


I bought this Little People farm from someone in my local mom's club forever ago and it's been in the back of my car, forgotten. I got my act together and cleaned it up and she went bananas for it. Her imitation of a chicken is priceless.

After a giant breakfast of blueberry whole wheat pancakes,

It was time for a nap.

After her nap, she got dolled up in her Easter finest. This is my best attempt at making her fashionable. The shirt is cute, but the skirt didn't quite work. It it supposed to be long and then flare out in a bubble at the bottom. It kind of just looked like it was falling off the entire time. It didn't help that the length was right but it was too big in the waist. I did some MacGyvering with a binder clip and at least it stayed up.

We hosted an afternoon playdate for some of Norah's buddies and their parents. I made them buckets with their names to carry their loot.

The bunny cake is a long time G tradition. My mom has made one every year for at least 35 years. Every 10 years or so my birthday falls on Easter and it did when I turned 6. That was also the year I had the chicken pox on my birthday, so she put red jelly beans all over the cake that year. (Before you think to yourself how nice that was, remember that she was the reason I got the chicken pox in the first place. When you have 4 young kids and one gets chicken pox you want them to all get chicken pox so at least your life totally sucks all at the same time. I don't remember which sister had them first, but I know I got cootified on purpose by someone).

Anyway, I made a few modifications this year--instead of the traditional white cake I made a low sugar, whole wheat flour, pumpkin cake (somewhat negated by the cream cheese frosting, I suppose....). The ears were also mini cupcakes, which I hoped would be good for little hands. Good for eating, good for smashing.

I didn't take many pictures of the afternoon because chaos soon ensued, but luckily Ava's mom has an amazing camera and takes amazing pictures. You can see them all here and these are a few of my absolute favorites.

Look at that face! This reminds me of a the verse my grandfather used to tell me reminded him of me when I was a little girl: "There was a girl, with a curl, right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good, she was very, very good. But, when she was bad, she was horrid."


It was a great day even though it poured rain the entire time.

Norah has maintained the Easter spirit even though the holiday is officially over. She has been hiding 'eggies' every morning and asking us to find them. Today she picked out one of her favorite eggs to take to Ruby. Thankfully, the neighbors still have their bunnies up. There is still a lot of hugging going on.