The Rickards Family: Easter

This Easter was pretty low key. Jason has been commuting to Bakersfield almost every day and as much as we would have loved to have spent Easter with our extended families, we decided to stay in town.

I absolutely love holidays. I love the excitement and the silliness of it. I love Santa and the Easter Bunny! The Tooth Fairy still comes to our house too! I love it! I love all of it!

I felt a little sad this year as I realized that our years with the Easter Bunny are almost over. Austin just turned 12 and will be in junior high next year. He's known about Santa and the Easter Bunny for a while. (Although his finding out about Santa story is kind of funny-sad, but funny. I just checked back through my blog to see if I had posted about it, but I think it must have happened right before I started blogging. Remind me to tell the story sometime.) He's a good sport and plays along, but the excitement is gone.

Jessica goes back and forth and sometimes still pretends she believes. Maybe it's because she is like an excited puppy when it comes to candy!

Lauren is on the edge, but we wont have the oldest kids for Easter next year and in two years, it may be all over. Of course Ashlyn is still little but, I'm not sure how that will all work out. Will the Easter Bunny come to our house when it's just her? I don't think it would be the same. We'll see...

Anyway, the Easter Bunny came to our house and we had a little Easter egg hunt in the morning when the kids woke up. Austin wasn't too excited about getting out of bed. He found a few of his favorite candies and then a cozy spot on the couch with a blanket while the other kids ran around filling their baskets. I didn't really get any pictures in the morning, but Jason took some video on his iPhone. I'm trying to figure out how to pull pictures from it. I'll post them if I can.

It was fun to hear the kids giggling and calling to each other as they found new things. It made the late night worth it. :-)

It was conference weekend, so we didn't have church. As the kids were winding down, we turned on Conference in time to hear the prophet speak. It was nice to sit together as a family and listen. I realized that the holidays will probably become more of what they "should" be as the kids get older and are able to understand more. I guess there is a season for everything.

Jen and her family decided to stay in town too, so my parents stayed to be with us. We showered up and headed over to my parent's house to spend the day with them. We had spent Saturday skiing and the week before had been so busy that we hadn't dyed any Easter Eggs. We thought it would still be fun to do and have another Easter Egg hunt at my parents house.So, after an early dinner, we colored Easter Eggs.