Easter

So, call me a little, or a lot, crazy, but with Joe out of the country I decided to take the four kids and my pregnant self to downtown D.C. on Easter morning. I mean, the cherry blossoms were supposed to be very beautiful, and I figured, who's going to be up and at 'em on Easter Sunday morning at 8 a.m.? It's going to be a breeze to drive into D.C., hop into an empty parking lot and just snap a few pictures.

I'm thinking I have pregnancy induced insanity, because it definitely wasn't a breeze! The traffic in D.C. was nuts and they closed a ton of parking to put up tents (?), so it took us a good half an hour to go about a mile. Thankfully, though, enough people were leaving for us to do a circle or two of the parking lot and pounce on a spot without too much hassle.

Then we got out of the car and joined thousands of our closest buddies, all vying for the perfect shot of blossoms in the background of their loved ones. At least these two were cooperating and being happy subjects while I blazed away.

When there are tons of trees with all these blossoms, it really is a pretty sight. This was our first photo op. As you can see, Dan still has all of his energy and is hamming it up. Josh needs to wake up.
Aaron is enduring all the posing. Getting them all to look in the same direction is a miracle. I must have taken a hundred photos that day!
Dan begged me to take this shot - he loved peeking through the branches.
Aaah, the typical shot with the Washington Monument in the background. For all you know I could have saved myself the trouble and Photoshopped it in. But, I didn't. Sigh.
Maggie was getting crabby and then giddy toward the end. She wanted to run, but I had to trap her in the stroller most of the time since there were so many people. She loved her new Easter hat, and she and Dan would go nowhere without their Easter baskets. They were eagerly anticipating an Easter egg hunt and I guess they thought it could start at any moment! They sure weren't going to be caught unprepared.
Some kind lady offered to take a picture of all of us. I'm not sure it was so kind to me, but I thought I'd better put up a pic or two of me preggo, since my family back in MN isn't really sure if I'm faking it or not.
The day before Easter I decided to do a fun craft with the kids where you make "Peeps" into little characters (Sir Peeps-a-lot or Little Bo Peep) with a cape or sword or something, and then launch them off a catapult to see whose Peep went the furthest. You can see how interested Aaron and Josh and his friends are - they're trading Pokemon cards. More about THAT insanity another time...
Here's one of the victims (Dan's, I think) about to be launched off our spatula.

Our neighbor, Martha, got really into it and made a bow, cape and even little shoes!
We, of course had some egg dying fun (Maggie dying fun?). Maggie's hand was bright red at the end of the night. She had no interest in any other color. "I want pink!" was her demand.
You can see that Aaron was really into the egg dying. He'd just received a new Warriors book from the library and couldn't put it down. Eventually he grabbed his obligatory 3 eggs and quickly dunked them before getting back to his fighting cats book.
We had some yummy and very colorful egg salad sandwiches in the following days. We really missed having Joe with us for Easter. We know how much he loves crafts, so we felt badly he was missing out on both the Peeps and the eggs. Oh, well. There's always next year!