He Is Risen! Alleluia!

We are a family of weirdos.

I know this because who else gets up at 5:30 am on a Sunday to attend the 7:00 am Easter Mass? Not many folks with young kids or teenagers. Our Gulf Coast Easter morning also began with an early thunderstorm (and the rain hasn’t moved out yet as I type this in mid-afternoon), so I felt a little like Mary of Magdala on that resurrection morn, heading out early while it was still dark outside. But inside the church?

He is risen! Alleluia!

Beauty and the celebration of the resurrection, and a little bonus for our family: three of us were excited when we spotted a photo on the front of the bulletin of Mr. Andi with our priest during last year’s Easter Vigil Mass. Mr. Andi was less enthused about being featured, but it was a beautiful reminder of his reception into the church in 2015.

Easter photos and candy-filled baskets were saved for after Mass, which really is the way it out to be, anyway, right? First things first: He is Risen! followed by the Alleluia! and then a celebration.

The photos I took outside are bad, and the ones inside the house are even worse, but sometimes you’ve just gotta roll with the punches when it’s dark and the natives are hungry for their breakfast casserole and chocolate chip buttermilk scones.

We opted out of the church egg hunt yesterday.

On a practical level, I get why they hold it on Holy Saturday, and we’ve gone before, but since Mr. Andi’s conversion we’ve put a little more thought into our faith traditions and holidays, and we can’t quite accept the idea of doing an Easter egg hunt when Easter is only almost here. It’s like our decision to wait until Christmas Eve to put up the tree. If you want an in-depth take on the no-church-egg-hunts-on-Saturday thing, Kendra had a great post on it last week. Of course, Christmas tree and Easter egg hunts are lagniappe, not doctrine, so YMMV.

But no egg hunting at the church doesn’t mean no Easter eggs. We boiled two dozen on Saturday night before bed and the kids dyed them in the kitchen after breakfast.

Sarah Kate did most of the work, and Nathan got a little impatient with his lack of participation in the process.

He did get to drop most of the eggs into the dye, a task that resulted in his having droplets of dye on his face. Hooray for the navy shirt that’s a hand-me-down from Sissy!

It was good for a little brother/sister bonding time, for sure.

Our eggs weren’t the most beautiful in the world – we just used regular food coloring and I didn’t research exotic color combinations ahead of time. All of the eggs have stains of other colors from the dye that oozed across the paper towel on the drying plate, but we didn’t mind.

Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful*…and neither do Easter eggs.

On the fly, I did try to mix some red and blue to make purple; the first attempt resulted in the egg in the top left slot of the carton on the left below. Mr. Andi affectionately refers to it as Turd Ferguson. (Yes, I did just use the t-word in an Easter post – I’m hoping there are some SNL fans out there who understand…) My second attempt at purple was the one right next to it – Sarah Kate said it looked like a potato, which is pretty much spot on.

It looks like rain all day today, so the egg hunting will either be done in rain boots or tomorrow morning sans Mr. Andi, but that’s okay, because today is only Easter Sunday – the octave of Easter doesn’t end until next Sunday (although I’m sure the candy will be long gone by then!)

Happy Easter!

*A great quote by Annette Funicello!
**From the classic “Celebrity Jeopardy” SNL skit found here