Easter

Easter happened, despite our family being sick.  We actually had a very nice Easter.  We didn’t get to the Vigil Mass because of illness, but we were all better enough to go to morning Mass and then to the local relatives’ for egg hunts and dinner. 

Just as an aside, we highly recommend the policy that we’ve adopted that states:  When a child gets up on Easter morning after 6 a.m., he or she may proceed downstairs to the living room and open his or her Easter basket, regardless of who else is up or not up.  He or she may not eat the candy, but usage of other, non-messy portions of the basket is fair game. 

This means that Michael and I get to sleep in on Easter morning, because the kids are all enjoying their Easter baskets and do not care that we’re not up.

 

We do the same thing for stockings on Christmas.  It works well for us.  We get downstairs and take photos of a fait accompli, of course, but there are lots of photo ops on Easter. 

Tess was fine with Easter baskets, but not terribly enthusiastic.  Well, she was enthusiastic about the toys in the other kids’ baskets, but they weren’t enthusiastic about having her play with their new stuff…  

Poor kids.  It’s always cold on Easter, and I’ve been getting them dress clothes that aren’t terribly warm for the past couple of years.  But this year, I thought, “Sweater dresses!  Perfect for Easter!  Of course, it was around 70 degrees on Easter this year.  Tess was the only one whose dress (which is one I made for Hannah when she was that size) reflected the weather.

Sim fared only slightly better.  At least the sweater vest wasn’t a full sweater. 

New dresses are new dresses, though, and the girls were not upset with their clothes. 

They also liked their matching hairdos.  I didn’t force the matching ‘do on either Sim or Tess.

We set up the tripod and used the timer.  Tess and Sim aren’t too impressed. 

 

New markers!  New coloring book!  New clothes!  Fun!

It looks like Tess was totally eating the contents of all those eggs, but I think what she’s got there is rice puffs.  Too bad!

Speaking of photo ops on Easter, someone (me) forgot the camera for the egg hunts.  So we have some pictures, but until Michael uploads them from his phone, I won’t be sharing them with you.

I’m glad I got this posted during the Easter season, at least!  Which finishes next weekend – I made it just under the wire. 

Um…hi!

So it’s been a while since anyone’s seen me here!  Craziness set in, I guess.  April was the month of illness for our family.  I should not have congratulated myself on our family staying relatively healthy through the winter, because Holy Saturday dawned with all of us sick except poor Michael, who then had to pick up the pieces and keep moving.  I had a plugged duct (not contagious, luckily), and everyone else had a nasty cold…that ended up giving Simeon pneumonia and Tess the first of her two ear infections of the month.

May’s here now, though!  We’re all doing fairly well.  And I thought I should probably share some pictures and stories, because it’s been a while, hasn’t it? 

Some of you may remember our daughter, Tess.  She’s hilarious and a bundle of joy…most of the time.  She also has a bossy streak, and even though she doesn’t have the large vocabulary of her siblings, she finds that high-pitched screams do the trick nicely when words fail her.  I try to tell them not to give in to the screams, and we’re slowly working on it, but sometimes it’s easier to just give in than have one’s eardrums punctured.

 

 

Tess loves books.  She’s like her parents, sisters, and brother in this.  She will do almost anything for a book.  The best way to distract her from anything is to offer to read to her.  The kids are often willing to read, but her appetite for books usually exceeds their patience with reading to her.

 

Tess also loves babies, real and doll.  She has taken over most of the household baby dolls – the ones that her sisters haven’t hidden away from her – and usually yells out, “Baby!” at Mass at least 400 times when there’s a baby nearby.  Which is almost every Mass.  She loves babies.

And when she can combine books and babies, she’s ecstatic.

Back in March (did I mention it has been a while since I posted?), we had a freak snowstorm.  The kids were thrilled.  They bundled up and went out to enjoy the snow.  I stayed inside and took pictures.  Snow is cold.

Tess went out for a while, but was back in much more quickly than the others.  She gets cold sooner.  When she wanted to nurse after I got her wet things off of her, I was pretty reluctant.  My experience with babies with cold hands is that they find their mother’s warm stomach to be a good place to warm up.  I wasn’t wrong this time, either.

The others stuck it out for a long time out there, doing out-in-the-snow things.

When they came back inside (under duress, and soaking wet), we had a lot of fun finding good places to hang all their stuff to dry.  And then wiping up the floor from where everything had dripped.  And then getting them to change their clothes.  And then brushing out their hair after it dried. (Well, that was just the oldest two.  Sim’s hair isn’t hard to brush out.). 

 

It was a good thing I let them out, though, because by the afternoon, the snow had vanished completely, and we were back to our usual rain.

Now, of course, we’re enjoying beautiful weather and the snow feels like some sort of far-off dream (thank goodness!).  The garden is growing and the kids are remembering what it’s like to wear short sleeves and not have socks on.  (When I told Sim that he didn’t need to wear socks with his sandals on warm days, he thought I was pulling his leg.  He laughed at me, and then, when he saw I wasn’t joking, took to it with the attitude of someone who is getting away with something.)  More later, but we are still here!