Easter!

Easter came early this year. I'm not super fond of it being at the end of March because it tends to be cold. Even though it was cold, we were up very early to see if the Easter Bunny had hopped into our house. He had and Emily was thrilled with what he got her. Mostly toys because she can be hyper enough without a lot of sugar.

After checking out what the bunny brought, it was time to get ready for church. Emily looked like a princess in her lovely yellow dress. We left to get to church early with Emily's new monster dolls in tow.

We got our normal seats which was nice though the church started filling up around us. Even for 8:30 service, most of the pews were filled. The service was lovely. Emily got to see her friends, and they were all lovely and cute. Especially at the children's message as Vicar Gregg asked the kids what their favorite holiday was. Emily is always very vocal during the children's message and it's always super cute.

At the end of the service, the choir and whoever wants to join in sang The Hallelujah Chorus. I love singing this! It's one of my favorite parts of Easter.

After church, we all piled into the car and started driving to GA. We don't have a lot of relatives around here. Todd's aunt lives two hours away. My aunt, uncle and my cousins live about three hours away. We try and visit when we can. 

All of my four cousins are married with kids. And quite of few of those kids are Emily's age. She

loves going to GA to play with her cousins. My aunt really went all out with a great meal - ham, of course. She also came up with a really creative Easter Egg hunt.

Instead of just looking for eggs around the house. She put the name of each kid on a series of eggs. They got a clue to look to begin with from her and then had to follow the clues around the house. Emily had a great time - though I had to run around with her since her reading levels aren't super great yet so I had to read the clues.

At the end, they had to give my aunt a hug and they got a small bag full of goodies. Emily got candy and a small cat stuffed animal that she loved! 

It was a nice gathering of family. I got to talk about Disney World since once of my cousin's is going next month and had some questions. So that was an extra treat.

Even though the ride is very long - three hours there and back. It's really worth it to be able to spend time with family for Easter.

The Egg Hunt of DOOM!

I like taking Emily to the free activities around town that pop up around the holidays.  We did several for Halloween and a couple for Christmas. Now that it's Easter, I wanted to take her to the egg hunt at Carrier Park in Asheville.

It has been quite a few years since we got to go to this particular event and I didn't realize what a mob scene it was going to be. The shindig started at 2 but I didn't get out of work until 1:30. Since the park is in Asheville we didn't get there until about 3 pm.

We had a hard time finding a parking spot and ended up parking about a mile away. I had my phone with me so I turned it on my Runkeeper app. It was .93 miles from our car to the park. The walk there wasn't too bad, especially because Emily was excited.

She had a great time while we were there. She got to meet the Easter Bunny and the Bojangles Chicken. She got to play in some bounce houses as well. It was really warm on Saturday and they ran out of drinks, so by the time 4 pm rolled around and it was time for the egg hunt itself, Emily was pooped.

She did do the hunt and got 4 eggs. The nice thing was that they also gave each of the kid's a goodie bag as they left. So even if your kid didn't a ton of eggs (or any), they would get something.

Then came the Doom part of the day - the walk back to the car. It was tiring for me and Todd, but you would have thought we were killing Emily. We had told her that we weren't going to carry her back and she said she'd walk. And she did walk back the whole way.

Afterwards, we were hot, tired and sweaty. So we went to get ice cream at our favorite ice cream place, The Hop. It was super busy there too but soon we had our ice cream and got to relax for a bit.

Both Todd and I decided that we weren't going to do that particular egg hunt again. There just isn't enough parking to handle the crowds.