Resurrection Day

I’m thankful for the freedom I experience to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.  Resurrection Day (as I like to call it) was cold here, but we were still able to enjoy the beautiful blossoms on the trees and bushes.  This always reminds me of the new life we can have in Christ.We were thankful to be invited to Easter dinner at someone’s house.  There were 22 adults and lots of kids of various ages.  Everyone brought different dishes of food, which means lots of good food!    Chris and Debbie (sitting across from each other in this picture) invited all of us to their home.  They had tables set up throughout the house for people to eat at.  Debbie and I are in the same Bible study, so she invited our whole group to join them, along with some others.  Sweet!

  Later in the afternoon, the older kids hid eggs so the younger ones could hunt them.  There were only 3 young kids, so the older ones went around to “help” the younger ones.Many of the eggs were plastic with candy in them.  Ethan would find them and before putting them in the basket, he would open the egg and drop the candy into the basket.  Many of you know that we still don’t allow him to eat chocolate or candy, so the candy meant absolutely nothing to him.  I know that will change one day, but hopefully not too much.What Ethan really cared about and wanted to do was to play football with the bigger boys.  He cared more about that than finding the eggs.

Easter Eggs

We went to a friend’s house for Ethan to dye eggs.  This was his first time. I really wish that I would have taken a video of this!  It was quite funny— Ethan and William just sat in their chairs quietly waiting for the eggs to change color.  It was like they were in a time out or something.Finally, some eggs were done and they were able to put more in the dye.This time they played in the mud while waiting for the eggs to change color -- which, of course, was much more fun!And, alas, they are finished!  And what happened next… yep!  Back to the mud!

Enjoying the Outdoors

My friend, Stephanie, came to visit for a month.  I’ve been really thankful that I’ve gotten to see her as much as I have considering where each of us thought we would be in the world.

While she was here our whole family was able to get out some and enjoy the late winter/early spring weather. March 15th is a holiday in Hungary, so we went to the rock quarry in our village and walked around.  Stephanie had never seen it before.  It is a really cool place.  Gary and I had one of the teachers take pictures of us there, which turned out to be our engagement pictures and the picture on our wedding invitation.  Ethan enjoyed picking up sticks he found. 

The next Saturday we went into the city to the Buda Hills (this particular place is called Janos Hegy).  We walked through the woods a while before getting to this tower that is in the picture below.

We probably should have put Sienna’s sunglasses on so she wouldn’t be making such a frowny face.A week later we went to a different place in the city.  This was the first place where Gary and I went hiking after Ethan was born (when he was 3 months old).  We hadn’t been back since then.

Our little rock climber.Ethan made it most of the way to the top on his own.  When he got near the top, he needed some help from Gary and then crawled over the top. Sienna didn’t make the whole hike.