(Nor) Easter...

as my husband jokingly referred to our blustery, chill holiday.

Easter is getting out of hand in this house I tell ya! We have our own little traditions of course. In recent years my parents have been visiting in the days leading up to Easter and as they have been quite over-taken by "Grandparent's Disease" (which manifests in the inability to visit small children without bearing gifts), there is always much to be added to the collective booty. And to top it off, Steve's parents have taken to sending a large Easter box every year full of strange and assorted objects, mostly culled from a year's worth of garage sales.

And so, this year for Easter, my children got: organic jelly beans AND chocolate eggs AND cookies. There were books, stickers, activity pads, art supplies, baseball gloves, a bat, a ball, a watering can, seeds, a hand trowel, a set of magnets, a set of beads, mini puzzles, and goodness knows what else I'm forgetting! And I thought I was finally starting to get things back under control after the Christmas deluge. Ha! Silly, silly me...

Little Rosebud had her first Easter basket though. And I did the filling on this one. A basket full of hand-me-down wooden toys, that have long been packed away for this particular occasion, as I suspected that she would just be starting to show an interest in that sort of thing. And one very carefully chosen book; "Spring" by Gerda Muller. She's a book baby already, cooing and squealing in my lap as I read picture books to the other children, and this one is a beauty that I am happy to share.

As is my own personal tradition, there was of course (!), a book tucked into every basket. In addition to "Spring", this years selections included "The Story of the Root Children" by Sibylle Von Olfers, as well as "The Wind Boy" and "The House Above the Trees", both by Ethel Cook Eliot.

We had a fairly quiet day. It is usually so and we prefer it that way. After the busyness and excitement of a visit from my parents (and more often then not, my sisters too) we are usually more then ready for some downtime. This year with the blessing being the day before, that need rang truer then ever.

And so we had a day of eating leftovers and way too much candy.

A day of playing cards and stringing jelly bean necklaces. A mostly pajama wearing kind of day with lots of cuddles. A reminiscing sort of day, looking back at pictures of Easter seasons past. That part of the day was what triggered the memory of these little booties; made from a pattern that the big boys spotted when Galen was a wee babe and insisted that our baby simply must have...

the memory of which sent Iain scurrying to rumage through boxes and pull them out once again for a new babe to wear.

All told, I must say, it was a very good sort of day.