Easter Party!

Today my mom's group had an Easter party at our house. There were a total of 8 children between the ages of 8mo and 3...it was CRAZY, CRAZY FUN! It was soooo wild and there were kiddos EVERYWHERE and running in all different directions and someone was always into something but I think we all had a great time...I love these crazy moments...it seems in the middle of the crazy moments you make some of the best memories.
One of my favorite memories of the day is after we ate lunch the kids were running around and I was in the kitchen and happened to turn around and see this:

Kenzie, Emmie, and Lucy

The girls (Lucy, Emmie, and Kenzie) were under my dining room table with a bag of chips chowing down! I told Brooke, who I know from college, that I had a flash forward to those girls in college sitting around in a dorm room snacking and talking just like we used to do. (KP...remember the late night Wal-Mart runs to get ice cream with our spoons in tow?)

Anyway, after everyone got to the house Ellie went down for her nap and we set out to dye some eggs. I put a card table flat on the ground outside and covered it with newspaper and that worked great. It didn't matter of the dye spilled and people weren't fighting over seats since it was on the ground.

Some of the kids were interested and some lost interest pretty quick. Emmie had a great time dying her eggs.

Funny story...Christina told Emmie to go ahead and put her egg in the dye and she THREW it across the table and knocked over the blue dye.

Everett and Brooke

Lucy, Kenzie, Jackson

Mikey, Jackson, Emmie

I kept trying to get Jackson to look at me and show me his egg but he kept looking at his egg and saying "cheese"...haha!

She sat so patiently waiting for her egg to be ready and then would fish it out of the cup and carry it carefully over to the carton so it could dry.

waiting...

checking the egg...

still waiting...

still waiting...a little messier by this point..

YAY! Finally the egg is ready!

After the eggs dried she enjoyed sitting with Lucy and Mikey and decorating her eggs with the glitter paint.

After dying eggs and playing on the swingset and in the sandbox for a bit we took the kids in for lunch. We had everyone's favorite chick-fil-A chicken nuggets and some AMAZING fruit and a yummy dip. Carissa brought some pasta salad when they came at the end of lunch (Will had school today) and it was delicious as well! I'd also made some bunny gingerbread cookies which turned out great (it was my mom's recipe and if you've ever had her cookies you know I had a lot to live up to!).

My sign says "happy easter"...I need to outline the letters.

bunny cookies

our yummy food

picnic in the den!

While everyone was eating I went and hid all the eggs (Dana brought 100! I was glad I was hiding them for little kids...big kids would have been disappointed with the lack of a challenge!) and then after lunch we took the kiddos out to hunt. I think Emmie would have been happy with just one or two eggs. She was much more interested in opening them than in collecting them. She was so funny...she wouldn't put the egg in her basket until she'd opened it up...guess she was planning to throw back any that didn't live up to her standards..haha!

Emmie and Lucy

Emmie and Kenzie

Will and Lucy

After egg hunting the kids played and the moms chatted and everyone slowly filtered out.

Days like today make me realize just how blessed I am to have such wonderful mommy friends that I can share this season of my life with. I'm also very glad that my girls have such sweet friends. I wish I had the words to convey how special this group of kids is to me. Emmie loves her friends so much and they all get along really well. They are all so sweet to Ellie and I love knowing that she has a ready made group of friends to play with when she's big enough to run around with them!

On a side note...after everyone was gone I put the girls down for naps and was cleaning up when I noticed Franklin was no longer on the couch. I figured he was in our bed so I went and looked but he wasn't there. I assumed he was around somewhere and I continued cleaning. I went to put something up in the girls' bathroom and there was Franklin laying in the doorway of Emmie's room...he's her little guard puppy apparently!