Easter Egg Hunt

More about Easter tomorrow when I have a little more time to write….

But here are some pictures from the Easter Egg Hunt that I took the girls to on Saturday. Alice took her favorite doll, “Beebee Kay-Ay” (Baby Katie) with her, and one time when I was taking pictures she wanted me to take a picture of her baby. So I did.

BBKayay

And then my father-in-law tried to get a picture of the three of us, but Helen just wasn’t really in the mood to be photographed…

DaGirlz

They had a great time searching for eggs, and it was a spectacular weekend for Easter for a change. Usually it either rains or is too cold for cute Easter dresses. Not the case this year. It was beautiful, and almost too hot.

Splish Splash

Today, I bought the girls Crocs, because we will be going back and forth to the pool a lot. And puddle stomping along that route is always fun. And these shoes can handle puddle stomping better than the pool shoes I’ve gotten the past two summers.

When Jerry came home from work, he decided to wash the cars. So he and Helen went out, Helen in her new Crocs, and washed his car. Then they came in for dinner, and we all went back out after dinner so he could wash my car. 🙂

Helen and Alice “helped.”

There’s a low spot in the driveway that always gets a good, deep puddle. Helen had a lot of fun in it:

Splish Splash

and Alice got soaked, too:

Alice and Daddy wash the front of the car

At one point, Alice sat down in the deepest part of the puddle which is why she was wet all the way down to her skin. She didn’t seem to care, though.

Socks

I remember the moment when I realized that I had bonded with my firstborn. I was folding laundry — the whites — standing at the peninsula in the kitchen in our old house. I came across the lingerie bag that contained the teensy little baby socks that newborn Helen had been wearing, and I just fell apart right there.

Ever since then, I have this weird affection for my children’s socks.

I used to imagine, when I was pregnant, how magical that moment would be… holding my newborn child, suddenly realizing all of the sacrifices my mother had made for me, and looking towards my mother and not needing to say anything. Just, finally, understanding. And we would nod at each other.

That moment didn’t happen in the hospital, like you always dream that it will. I thought Helen was cute and all, but I was in a lot of pain in the hospital. I was pretty strung out on painkillers for about 10 days, really.

The Moment happened when I was probably two weeks post partum (judging by the fact that I was actually standing up, which I couldn’t DO for a while), folding laundry in my kitchen. All of a sudden, I Got It. It was startlingly clear to me that day, that suddenly there was this little creature that I loved more than I loved myself or Jerry, more than I loved ANYthing else in this world. You dream about moments like this — the magic of them, the romance. Socks. I was folding SOCKS.

And tonight… Tonight I was on ScrapShare, posting the journaling on my “More Helenisms” page, and I had that same feeling again. And, again, I cried. Silly, but I did.

God, how I love my children. I tell them constantly, but I will never be able to truly express how much they enrich my life. They make me laugh, they make me scream, they make me cry, they make me WHOLE.

35 pages done!

More about the INCREDIBLE retreat later, but I got 35 pages done! Here’s one of my absolute favorites, using Basic Grey papers and the Sizzlits Script alphabet. It’s of all the funny phrases that Alice says. I’ve remembered about 5 more that I need to add to it. 🙂

The World According to Alice