Easter 2017

Happy Easter-This year from New Jersey!

Since we spent Thanksgiving in NJ and it is such a long drive, we held off another visit until Easter. We elected to drive via 301 through Maryland in lieu of 95 through DC. This has two distinct advantages- traffic and my parents. We always hit DC and Baltimore traffic, regardless of the hour (short of it being practically the middle of the night) and we drove within miles of my Mom's house. She kindly provided us lunch (which we so needed by the time we showed up around 3:00) and a walk to the river. I left my camera in the car, unintentionally, so this is left to the memories of the mind's eye. We found these really big snail shells down by the river and piles of cool driftwood. It was a short but nice visit, and then we were off to NJ.

Kevin wanted to do some work around his Mom's house, and mostly we ended up outside. It was chilly to me, but really not bad.

Another huge benefit to NJ over Easter is Mary! Mary now lives within a few miles of Kevin's Mom, but we never see her when we visit over Thanksgiving or Christmas because she travels home. The girls and I got to spend the day with her on Saturday and attend mass with her (well, mostly with her, as she is in the band/choir!). Again, where was my camera?? This is starting to look like a theme.

Easter Sunday the Bunny showed, of course, complete with clues to find the baskets (on adorably fun stationary that may have been found at Mary's house and assembled with her help!)

At least I had the camera for this one! This takes my winner for best photo of the trip.

Found them!!!

After church, we headed to Grams for a meal- prepared with love and as delicious as anticipated. The homemade noodles she makes are incredible (as is always the case) and we probably could have all just eaten that, but there was way more than one would have anticipated for an advertised "simple" meal.

Outside of Grams house (before I fixed my white balance- grr!)

Grams showered the kids with gifts, including these little lawn ornaments, which we love- just the right amount of quirky for us!

The weather was really hot on Easter (much to my relief, as I packed a sleeveless dress with no backup plan) but it poured down rain later in the day. There were Easter egg hunts at Grams' house courtesy of Aunt Chris and the kids did more confetti eggs, but I left my camera behind because of the weather, which was intermittently sunny and lovely and sheets of rain.

We raced home on Monday morning (happy that Stephanie was off of school that day!) to make T-ball practice. We skidded into my parents house for bathroom breaks and to pick up food to go (so much food- but we managed to take nearly all of it down before we hit the NC border), but we were ultimately foiled by the bad weather. The rain was steady and hard, and we would have been about 20 minutes late for practice, so we skipped it entirely. We at least made it home early enough to have dinner, get to bed and reset for the restart of the normal routine.