Easter Sunday

Happy Easter! We hope all our fair readers had a wonderful Easter--and one that, ideally, was warmer than ours. We woke up to two inches of snow this morning. :(

This week has been fairly busy for us. After getting over colds at the beginning of the week, Dan was back to the grindstone that (we hope!) will lead to his graduation later this summer. I had the last two of my writing workshops for the writing center this week, on writing dissertation and thesis proposals. I think they went fairly well, but I'm glad to be done (at least until we start up the summer workshops!). Outside of school and work, we haven't done much, aside from trying to keep up with the crazy weather. After being in the seventies at the beginning of the week, we've been having snow flurries for the last four days. Not that much of this fazes Andrew in any sense. Here's a shot of him kicking back in his chair. (I had to laugh--he sat there for perhaps five full minutes with the sippy cup dangling from his teeth while he tried to get the animals out of the Little People silo).



Yesterday was probably the busiest day of the week. I started off the day with a short-lived attempt to go to one of the first yard-sales of the season. (Despite the alluring advertisement, there wasn't much there for us, and it was too cold for Andrew or I to stay long). After Andrew's morning nap, he and I rushed to the church for the ward Easter brunch. (Dan spent most of the day in lab). I was sure we would have missed most of breakfast, as we were about twenty minutes late. However, we arrived to find that brunch had not even started! We stayed for breakfast and the Easter egg hunt (although technically Andrew's not nursery age, so he was there on sufferance). Although he had been fascinated by the plastic eggs I got out for him earlier in the week, he couldn't quite get the hang of picking up eggs. Generally he would pick up the first one he found and was so excited by that one that he couldn't be bothered to go after any others. Here he is with the two eggs he found at the church. Doesn't he look excited?



Of course, just to make sure Andrew got the full egg-sperience (sorry, could n't resist!) of egg hunting, Dan and I also took him to the city-wide Easter Egg hunt sponsored by the Centre County Parks and Recreation. This was actually a pretty incredible spectacle--several hundred parents and children lined up in the bitter cold to gather the 7800 + eggs some incredibly generous people had spent the time to stuff with candy.



I don't think Andrew entirely understood what we were waiting for, but he was pretty game. As soon as the countdown was over, he trotted over to the eggs on the grass, squatted down, and started picking them up. (Of course, once he finished picking up the ones that were within his immediate vicinity, he was pretty much done).









Of course, lest you think our entire Easter celebration was an entirely frivolous egg-oriented consumption, let me assure you it was not (although that was certainly a lot of yesterday's experience). I've been trying to talk to Andrew a little bit all week about the Easter story (although I don't think he understands much). Earlier I got him a little book about Easter. As we were driving home from the store in the car I asked him if he had a book about Jesus and he repeated "Jee," "Jee," which I chose to interpret as assent. And this morning he and I watched the church's video about The Lamb of God. Andrew seemed particularly interested in the nativity (likely because of the baby).

Of course, we did get Andrew an Easter outfit, with the de-rigeur sweater vest (all the rage with the young children these days, we're told).





At church today, our choir performed for the first time and actually did quite well, if I say so myself. We sang "O Savior Thou Who Wearest a Crown" (the Bach arrangement always gives me chills--but the good kind!) and "That Easter Morn." After church, we had dinner with our friends, the Sturgeons, whose daughter Gabi is one of Andrew's favorite (and only!) playmates. Good food, good company, good times. We cut short our visit, however, to get our drooping boy home in time (barely) for bedtime.

And this brings us to the end of our Easter festivities. If we were in Hungary, we would still have one more day for the celebration: the Monday following Easter is typically a day for the "locsolas" (from the verb "locsolni," which means literally "to sprinkle," as in flowers). As I remember it, it's a typical Hungarian custom for young men and boys to "sprinkle" the women of their acquintance--with water, if you were lucky; with cheap (and smelly) perfume if you weren't so lucky. (I think it stems from the idea that young women were like flowers). In return for this favor, women are supposed to give their visitors some sort of present (money for young boys; liquor for older men). Since I don't have the liquor or the loose change (much less the desire to be coated in variegated smells), it's just as well that tomorrow, for us, is simply another work day!