Great day today.  The opportunity to celebrate the resurrection life of our Savior with children who have never heard of God’s love is truly a blessing!  It is interesting to watch these girls try and absorb the truth that someone cared enough about them to die for them.  They don’t think they are worthy of new clothes, let alone the amazing sacrificial love that Jesus has given them.

Kelly spent most of the day yesterday preparing for having family over today for dinner.  Here is the dessert that she made, Peeps on a nest:

And here is one of the centerpieces she made for the dinning room table:

Easter morning started out with a sunrise service at church, where the girls wore their brand new Easter dresses.  They have been SO very excited to wear their dresses!!  They were a little thin for the coolness of the outdoor service, but they brought blankets and covered up.  Between services, we posed for a quick family photo!

It’s nice to be able to take a picture with everyone smiling, although to be honest, I did have to take parts from three different pictures to make this one work.  *sigh*  You know the story of the plumber whose own sinks are leaking?  That is how I feel most days.  Seems like I can never get a great picture of our own family.

Later in the day it was time for the kids to search for their Easter baskets.  Jacob and Nick are too cool to do that any longer, but the rest of the clan joined right in and the new additions seemed to have a lot of fun.  The kids challenge us to find harder spots than the previous year, and that tends to be challenging after you have lived in the same house for eleven years.  But I think Kelly and I outdid ourselves as they really had to search and I believe most of them needed some help.

It was great to see the joy on Riley’s face when she found hers!

Jessie stumbled across Leah’s before she found her own.

But later found her’s behind the front door.

I was pretty mean to Mia.  I don’t think she would have ever found her’s.  I let her hunt for awhile…

…and then felt bad and provided her more direction.

This is Max finding Luke’s Easter bag.  It took Max MUCH longer to find his own.

Leah enjoys perusing the spoils of her discovery.

As did Luke and Jessie.

Several weeks ago Kelly bought some necklaces from a friend of ours who is selling them as part of a fund raiser for their current adoption.  I will post the information on a separate blog,  but the girls looked very pretty with their new jewelry!

Later in the day Kelly’s family came over and we had dinner out of the patio.  We then hid Easter eggs all over the front and back yard and the kids had to go find them.  We started with the “younger” group, as the older kids would run right over them if we didn’t!

Jessie wasted NO time getting to understand the process!

Max quickly found eggs to fill up his bag.

Ali was probably the most diligent hunter of the group, continuing to find eggs long after most of the kids had stopped looking.

Aunt Koreen helped Leah navigate through the grass in the wheelchair!  I think you can count this as aerobic exercise!!

Mia looks around for any last eggs that may have been missed.

Some of the eggs have numbers on them rather than candy inside.  Those eggs are VERY valuable because they represent money!  Grandpa Busdiecker decided to make it a little more challenging in that you could guess how much money each egg was worth and if you were right, you got double.  If you were wrong, you got nothing.  These kids are too smart.  They all went for the sure thing!

Luke was one of the first up.

Jessie didn’t want to receive her money in front of everyone, but she was too smart not to take it!  So, here “hand off” was a little more covert!

Now the challenge is to get all these kids hopped up on sugar into bed!  Tomorrow starts another school week!!

Cameron