Easter celebration

I'm a little on the late side with this post but your daddy has been out of town for the past two weeks for a training so I have an excuse.  Of course, there is no excuse for the week before he left but we will just forget about that part......

I am always looking for new fun traditions to start and I found one this year for Easter.  Actually, Aunt Heather found it, the day before Easter.  But since daddy was at work and we didn't have any plans we dove right into it.  We EGGED some of our friends. 

The directions said that we needed to egg two people, but we went a little overboard.  I let each of the older girls pick two people to egg, then I also picked two.  So six it was!  But it wasn't the typical egging that I may or may not have done in high school, this was the socially accepted form of egging.  We hid Easter eggs in the yard (or just left them on the porch for those houses we went to while it was raining) and left a few homemade goodies.  The first three houses were "in town" as we refer to it now, so we did those in the morning. 

While we were "in town" we also went to our churches Easter Celebration.  I love how our church does it!  They take the fun aspects of Easter with the egg finding and the games and the religious parts of Easter and weave them together to make for one awesome event.  So we took our Lamb of God Easter baskets that we made with grandma and Nana and went to the celebration. 

After the church celebration we got back to egging people; this time in our neighborhood.  We made some cute cookies using some extra frosting and got back to sneaking around. 

Bumpkin and Troublemaker thought it was so much fun and would have kept egging people all day if I would have let them.  But we ran out of eggs, baskets, and homemade goodies so we called it good.  Plus, we were already breaking the rules and had egged three times the amount of people we were supposed to.  (Not a good sign that you girls might break the cycle of being an overachiever.....)

Finally, we ended the night making Resurrection Cookies.  I think these are a wonderful idea, but I missed the big bold writing at the very top of the instructions that says to preheat the oven before you put the cookies in, then turn it off when you put them in.  So ours didn't do anything during the night... but it was the thought and story that mattered.  We will try again next year and I'm willing to bet I won't make that mistake again. 

There is a bunch of symbolism in how the cookies are made but here is just some of it (basically what I got pictures of).  We had to beat the almonds to symbolize the beating Jesus received. 

We mixed the ingredients together and they were white to symbolize the purity of Jesus. 

Then we put the cookies in the oven (that was supposed to be preheated... opps!) and sealed it shut (with tape).  This symbolized the sealing of the tomb with the stone. 

And finally, we put Elmo on duty.  He sat in front of the "tomb" and kept watch just like the Roman soldiers.  He took his job very seriously.