First Annual Phillips Family Spring Day

In an effort to keep Easter focused on the miracle of our Savior's life mission Marc and I instituted "Spring Day" as one of our family traditions so the kids won't miss out on all of those fun commercial things that Easter brings. Spring Day for our family will fall the Saturday before Easter Sunday and it's a day when we will celebrate spring. I've already got a few new ideas for next year's festivities but here is what we did this year:

Egg Hunts

The "Spring Bunny" came to our house and hid eggs all over on Spring Day's Eve. When the boys woke up Saturday morning, their buckets were in front of their bedroom door waiting. The boys got right to it and hunted all the 70+ eggs down. Carter was so sweet to put a few eggs in his brother's basket when the thought struck him to do so. Carter ended up with 49 eggs while Anderson held his own for being so young and brought in 22. Why so many eggs for such a small family? Well, those are just the eggs I happened to have from college and grand kid care packages in years past. I swear I only bought 6 jumbo eggs this year. We also attended another egg hunt later in the morning that our good friends hosted. The eggs were in the back yard and in true Colorado fashion it began snowing right as the hunt commenced. (You can always expect snow on Halloween and Easter around here.) The boys each brought home their allotted 13 or so eggs. All these eggs = loads and loads of candy. The boys were definitely sugared up!

Spring in the Kitchen

Included in this years festivities were making bird's nests as treats and egg dying. This is actually the first year I can ever remember dying eggs so it's a good thing Marc had some experience.

Easter

We chose to use The 12 Easter Eggs tradition that is floating around Mormon land to teach Carter the true meaning of Easter. If you aren't sure what I'm referring to, there are 12 scriptures with corresponding items that you put inside 12 eggs. Every night for 11 nights prior to Easter we opened one egg and in so doing taught Carter about Christ's journey to Resurrection. He caught on pretty quickly and definitely remembers that Christ died on a cross where wicked people put nails through his wrists, hands and toes. In fact, today Carter gave his first talk in Primary on this very subject. He got scared and teary so Marc actually gave the very short talk while Carter held up two pictures. We spent a very peaceful Easter Sunday watching The Testaments and eating dinner with my parents, brother and his girlfriend.

And now on to the pictures:

While I made this slide show, I couldn't help but think: What a difference a year makes! Check out how Anderson spent last year's Egg Hunt: