Springtime and Easter Celebrations

Better late than never! Well, so much has happened that this will be the first of a few picture heavy posts all at once. Hehe. 

We have had so much lately though! We spent a good few nights in late March and early April enjoying the cool weather and our backyard- which we had just started cleaning up for the Spring. 

For Easter we painted cascarones like we do each year, then the kids hid them for each other. That last part was different- in past years it was Q and I that hid them for the kids, but this time they wanted to do it themselves. and we of course also had a cookout. We've had a lot of cookouts lately. It's just so nice to finally have nice weather- even when it was cool, it wasn't horribly cold, just cold enough for lighting a fire in the fire pit outside. Yay! Except for those crazy freezes I guess. For the most part it's been nice, though, so we've been trying to enjoy it.

The kids also helped me prepare for our Easter ceremonies- we have a few each year with our local church and with the church in Mexico. I grew up celebrating Palm Sunday, Black Friday, and Easter Sunday, and after coming to the States, where the Methodist church often does a service of lights and/or Maundy Thursday, we've also started celebrating those. We only almost never celebrate Ash Wednesday because it feels less important, since Jesus didn't institute it, and it merely signifies the beginning of Lent. In the case of Ash Weds we only try to attend as a matter of regular attendance, but I did not go out of my way to make it happen this year.

I don't think I have pictures of everything, because usually during services it feels odd to be taking video or pictures, but even this year when neither our churches had a Service of Lights, we just had our own here at home. To my mind, the celebration of His death, while instituted by the Church and not Jesus, is central to a Jesus-focused celebration of Easter, and it is of course very meaningful to the progression of the story and inhabiting it in remembrance of Him. Easter is so much more important to our faith than any other celebration- even Christmas, if you ask me. I think this is why I spend so much time trying to decide how we will celebrate it each year- and admittedly, that has changed a lot as my own understanding of my personal faith has changed, and as I try to fuse it with Q's tradition so that we have a tradition for our family, while the children celebrate with us. 

Palm Sunday was recorded by the children's ministry of our local church. It was just the children, and they had the traditional parade singing Hosanna and waving their palm branches. It was beautiful.

 

On Palm Sunday we also celebrated a Black Friday-like service with our church in Mexico (online), celebrating the washing of feet and having the Last Supper.

And the pictures at the beginning of the post are from our Easter celebration of course.

Here's more pictures of egg painting and other Spring related games

We also spent a whole morning one of those days playing in an enchanted garden of our own making. It was a fun morning. I remember freaking out later that day that I hadn't done any work at all, but it was worth it. In retrospect I think I might have been enjoying an early bout of Spring fever. LoL. It was great to have that feeling, that it was finally here, after such a long and crazy winter.