Easter beasts

Oh hello. Yes it has been a while. We have had some extremely busy weekends, and then I put the girls in swim lessons but I couldn't get them in at the same time so we have been at the pool four times a week all month and it is a LOT.

But I'm here now, so let's go back in time like three weeks. To Easter! Easter has historically been Joel working all weekend and me trying to find the most time-consuming egg-dyeing project I can. But now, we are busy and important people who have to squeeze our activities around school and things (jk there is still so much day in the day, preschool is short, and also Joel still worked all weekend).

Also, we have all these new things to check out! Like, where is a good Easter bunny! Is it at the corn maze? I tell you what is at the corn maze, is an orchard full of just like hundreds of eggs. And you go 'find' as many as you want!

And then go put them down this chute!

And then go collect your goodie bag! And then go get your face painted like a bunny!

Or a yoonicorn!

(Ok this is some terrible face painting but only because we have snobbish tastes.)

There's also a beebee goat.

There's also a hay bale maze.

Oh look there IS an Easter bunny!

There's also a bouncing pillow.

Or SAND, if the pillow is too much for you.

And a...pole cow?

And tether ball.

And a DIGGER.

And an ENORMOUS tire.

And a puddle. Get those skirts WAY up, girl.

And then LATER THAT DAY, we did that thing where you shave up bits of crayon and then sprinkle it on your eggs straight out of the boiling water, and the crayon bits melt all down the egg.

And then you dye them afterwards.

I'm always surprised when things I let the kids mostly do come out looking great but THEY CAME OUT LOOKING GREAT.

And then we started our paska sponge because we didn't actually have all day Sunday to make buns, we have family stuff now!

The next morning, we added things to the sponge

like flour (look at those leetle helper hands omg)

and went outside to blow bubbles and then like had a bath, I dunno, other time-killey things and this part felt very familiar

 but then we punched down the paska dough

and then ballsed it into balls

and then everyone took a nap while I baked it,and Eleanor did all the sprinkling because Geneva was doing a sleep.

Took the kids to grandma and grandpa's, did an egg hunt.

Geneva just surreptitiously ate all the hard-boiled eggs when no one was looking.

It was also Grandma's birthday.

There was a lot of sugar to run off.

And then we rolled our butts home. MONDAY we had our own little egg hunt at our own little house.

I LOVE IT I want to hide eggs and have them hunt for them every day.

Which, ok, is kind of what Eleanor does for like four days after Easter, until I put the eggs away.

I found some MASSIVE eggs this year, so I could put, like, Wonder Woman and Bumblebee in them instead of just junky garbage.

But obviously also some junky garbage. 

And then because it was Monday, the girls watched a movie (with their baskets, natch)

and then it was OVER.

A cold day, a warm day, a birthday.

Hoo golly, was this weekend ever a frolic. There was a food truck festival in the next town over, so we braved the weather and it was cold and people need to stop telling me how warm it was this time last year because by the time WE showed up in July, it was raining again (you may recall). Anyway: food trucks; cold.

Got this dim sum platter.

Got this ham hock with sauerkraut and some super dry rye bread, it was not great.

Got this Godzilla mac n cheese, with seaweed bits and Japanese mayo. Geneva in the back tryna snatch the fork.

Got a bag of mini donuts, for warms if nothing else.

Went home oh man so cold.

BUT! Sunday morning was bright and sunny, and there was a barn-burner a'happening. A bbq competition. A meat roast!

We got there like 10 minutes after start, and still had to park a mile down the road and walk, but it was WORTH IT.

Immediately we walk in, there's this giant wood-burning oven, and they hand us two slices of this mango-pineapple chutney, pulled duck, goat cheese pizza.

Some couple dozen vendors showed up to participate in the competition, but also to just like roast a whole pig and then chop it up in front of us and let us squirt one of four bbq sauces on it. I asked the girls later what their favorite part was, and they BOTH said the pig that was being cut up! Even though they also got their faces painted, and other rad things. The wierdos.

Eleanor was a unicorn.

Geneva was a doggo.

And then much later, when we found the balloon animals, Geneva got a unicorn and Eleanor got a dog. On purpose they did this.

Anyway. Grill marks here,

cheese scone there,

baby riblet eats a riblet.

And then we all rolled home.

And THEN. We went to Frankie's birthday party, for whom we had gotten a horse (we spent a non-zero amount of time brushing that horse's mane).

I was like, Let's wrap him up so he still looks like the thing he is! It'll be hilarious. It turned out to be SUPER DIFFICULT but also look at him he looks majestic.

The girls had ice cream sundaes,

they played out in the warms,

the horse was ceremoniously unwrapped!

And then we all ate Chinese food and rolled ourselves home.