In Which I Forget a Whole Bunch of Stuff!

One of my ongoing projects as a homeschooler and as a homemaker has been to remember holidays - you know, to actually do things for the holidays rather than remembering "Oh yeah, I should have done something for that" in retrospect.

While I did pretty well for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day, I pretty much fell flat on my face for St. Patrick's Day and Easter.

I started out well for St. Patrick's Day - we did this scavenger hunt (though we only got to it yesterday, several weeks after the fact) and then green pepper print painting:

Mommy's pepper painting...

... and the 6yo's green pepper painting! 

(To do pepper prints, slice the bottom off of a bell pepper and use to make prints - like potato painting! It's harder than it looks (slippery!), but still fun.)

We also made green sugar cookies, colored with chlorophyll:

However, then a cold hit our house, and everyone got sick within 48 hours - and the rest of my St. Patrick's Day plans went out the window that week. On St. Patrick's Day itself, I completely forgot to do any of the special little things I had planned (green jello, green milk, green pepper-slice shamrocks, etc.). I read the story of St. Patrick to the family during devotion time and called it a day. (Have you ever read it? It's fascinating!)

This book of missionary stories came with our Sonlight Core A curriculum. We found it too advanced for our 5yo, but it is filled with great missionary stories that we plan to read later - including the story of St. Patrick. 

Easter was even worse, activity-wise. We attended an egg hunt for our MOMS club, but that was about it. I even forgot our Benjamin's Box activity! (Next week... next week...)

However, we had a great time attending Good Friday service and having our family egg hunt and Easter dinner on Saturday.

The 1yo got to do his first egg hunt, as well!

We assigned the 6yo to help the 1yo and 3yo find their eggs before he got his (though he got them all in the end), and we were really pleased with how helpful of a big brother he was!

My culinary adventure of the day was making refrigerator rolls, which were easy to make and smelled delicious! ("Tastes good too, so they tell me!" Name that quote!) I made them in our food processor, which greatly simplified the process (though it rather overloaded the food processor).

After this full day of Easter festivities, we headed straight out to a neighbor's wedding reception, where we had a great time and stayed several hours. At the end of the day, we were tired - it was definitely a full day.

Today (Easter Sunday), we attended. two church services (sunrise service at a friend's house, and regular church later) today. Have you ever taken three young children to a sunrise service? When the alarm went off this morning, my first thought was, "This is the dumbest idea I've ever had and we are never doing this again!" But we had an absolutely wonderful time and decided we want to do this annually. It was awesome!!

After the two services, we came home in a state of utter too-tired-to-think-straight fatigue, and ended up sleeping for almost two and a half hours this afternoon. (Thankfully everyone was tired!) Is there anyone else out there who (1) loves the holidays, but is also (2) intensely thankful when they're over? I find myself in an odd dichotomy between the two.

Happy Easter, everyone! He is Risen! I hope that each of you has had a fun and blessed Easter weekend.

The eggs that we finally remembered to dye, three days after the fact!