Hippity Hoppity (Part I, Easter on the way...)

Happy Easter, everyone! 

The blink of an eye and here we are, the last week of March and Easter come and gone already.  

And here I am, the last evening of my spring break, and only now getting around to writing a blog post about any of it.  Time, and the flying! I can't handle it.

But-- no time like the present to get you up to speed.  Not counting the hole in our bathroom ceiling (current plumbing issue: a blocked drain in the upstairs bath), and your usual run-of-the mill sibling squabbling and holiday stress, we've had a pretty stellar week.  Nice weather, time off, lunch out with my honey (two days in a row!).  I could really handle a lot more of this spring break.

Focusing on the great memories of spring break instead of the reality of a fast-approaching 5am wake-up as I head back to the real world tomorrow....

Recap of the festivities:

Thursday's trip to Berlin (driving tour of the heart of Amish Country, in which I turned into my mother and pointed out all the things, then an exceedingly long stay at Kaufman's Lawn Furniture, which was surprisingly awesome) and Strasburg (lovely relaxing dinner with my lovely, relaxing family).... 

Boys are never too big for diggers...

Look!  Sometimes my children play together, without screens!!

Jack and Ivy are playing checkers in a log cabin.  We are in love with these tiny log cabins and really want to set up a whole compound of them somewhere by a lake...

 Egg hunting at Aunt Pat's house.  The breezeway is MADE for egg hunts...

Baby Alex-- not such a baby any more!

Those fisher pice toys.... magic.

 Friday-- we were so stinking wholesome all day!  We made cookies, times 2.

 (I love this picture.  The kids chopping nuts with the antique chopper that I used as a kid to help my mom...)

 Then our friends came over for our annual egg dyeing  tradition...

These three bunnies!

You'd be amazed at how little egg dye we spilled. We rock at this! 

 Finished product!  Not pictured: eggs.  Not sure why we didn't get finished egg pictures.  oh well.

Saturday:  Time to get dressed up and visit the Gardens!

My beautiful babies, all ready to head out into the beautiful day...

We tried valiantly to get a photo of the kiddos with our resident Easter Bunny (first Easter with the bunny and the chickens, after all!) but it turns out that while Toasted Marshmallow is the cutest bunny on earth, he is perhaps the least cooperative.  Here's the best of the lot of bunny pictures....

Off we go!

 The Gardens were splendid as always.  Smelled like heaven in there.

 An early Easter meant no outdoor flowers yet.  But they made up for it with ribbon streamers.

 Annual picture in the seed sculpture!  I can't believe they fit!  We kind of wedged them in there...

Bedtime calls. Part II (Easter day and water park!) will have to have it's own post, shortly...