Late in the afternoon, we headed inside to color Easter eggs.
Before bed, we scrubbed off all of the mud and then I wound the girl's hair up for their special Easter "do's".
Because Ava would be singing at an earlier service than we usually attend, I made sure to lay out all clothes and accessories for what Ava calls, "The fanciest Sunday of the year!". Despite all of my preparations, we still rushed out the door 15 minutes late. Such is life with little girls and their need to put on all of those frills!
I still managed to snap a couple of pictures before they headed out the door.
I know that I am biased, but they were lookin' good!
I dropped Ava off at the choir room for practice, and then Mike, Em, and I went upstairs to find a seat. We were lucky to squeeze in! The church had 4 services for Easter this year. The 9:30 service (the first service that Ava sang for) had 640 people in attendance! I was pretty impressed that everyone found a seat, considering that the capacity for our sanctuary is 500. As a result of this record attendance, Ava sang in front of her biggest crowd yet!
Our children's ministry aligned their Lenten theme with the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly this year. For the last 6 weeks, the girls have been studying this in addition to helping make handprint butterflies, puffy paint butterflies, cut-out butterflies and MORE to decorate the church for Easter morning. In the first clip in the video below, I recorded some footage of the sanctuary while the 11:00 service band warmed up. There were butterflies everywhere...on the walls, on our pastors, in the plants....everywhere! These butterflies that you see are not those that the children made, but the whole basement (where the classrooms are located) was decorated with those. It was just COOL!
The second clip is of Ava's choir performance. She's still lovin' it! She was starting to look a little tired by the second performance (the one I recorded) after being up late with Easter excitement and waking up at 7 am(not to mention that fact that her sugar high was probably wearing off). But she was still hangin' tough. As a kindergartner, she's one of the youngest kiddos in the choir.
Here are a couple of shots of our silly girls in the car on the way home from church.
Since we didn't have time do the Easter baskets before church, we opened them after.
Then we changed to go to an Easter dinner at a friend's house. The girls were looking so cute, I just had to take a few more pictures.
With the Easter baskets opened, they achieved their 2nd sugar high of the day. Check out Ava's blue mouth!
Emily forbade us from calling her "Curly Sue".(A nickname that Mike tried out on her because of her fluffy Easter hairstyle). Because, "That's NOT my name!" Duh. : )
We hope that all of you had a wonderful Easter too!
