Our First Spring Celebration

     Starting with this year's Spring Equinox I'm making an effort to have kid-friendly and fun activities to celebrate the seasons.  And luckily since stores have been selling Easter stuff for over a month now, I had plenty of options to choose from for Springtime.

Fun facts about Easter:

• It always takes place on the Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring.  That's why it's on a different date every year.
• The origin of the name Easter comes from the Saxons in Germany-- their goddess of Spring was named Eostre, and rabbits and eggs for them were symbols of rebirth.  Christians later incorporated those into the celebrations surrounding the resurrection of Jesus and they changed the name to Easter.  But that's why Easter is still associated with rabbits and eggs, because those are traditionally parts of western Spring celebrations.

     Well, we started off Friday night with decorating cookies with pastel frosting and bunny sprinkles.  My first mistake was making sugar cookies.  Sugar cookies, while delicious by themselves, become sugar overload when you add frosting.  In the back of my mind I knew that while I was making them, but I didn't fully realize it until I took a bite of my cookie.  Lesson learned.

Little One decorating his cookie... 

... and the results.  My second mistake was thinking he could

control the outflow of sprinkles by himself.  ;)

Baby Girl decorating her cookie...

... and the results.  Not bad for her first time.

Mc decorating his cookie.  He looks so serious.

     My third mistake was doing this cookie thing so close to bedtime... the kids were pretty hyper for a while and they didn't get to bed until late.  I learned all kinds of lessons that night, haha!

Then on Saturday morning we let Baby Girl wear her butterfly wings from Halloween.
The elastic wasn't working well and the wings were flopping to the side,
so Daddy improvised (it's a retractable ethernet cable).  ;)

We gave them their baskets and little bunnies.

Mc hid 5 eggs in each of the kids' bedrooms and each kid got to find the ones in his or her bedroom.

They had a lot of fun with that!  And they enjoyed the few jelly beans in each egg.

     That afternoon Mc and I went out for a while and the babysitter helped the kids make candy necklaces with Spring colors and decorations (that's why I don't have pictures of them).  She said Baby Girl did well but that Little One just shoved the candy into his mouth.  Even when she showed him slowly how to put the candy on the string, he then slipped them off the string and plopped them into his mouth.  He's a funny little kid.

     Then for bedtime I read the book A New Beginning: Celebrating the Spring Equinox to Baby Girl and I explained what Spring is and what changes it brings to the Earth.  Some of the concepts in the book are a little advanced for her for now, but by next year she'll understand about the tilt of the Earth in relation to the Sun and all of that, and she'll be old enough to do some of the activities in the back of the book.

     This was my first time celebrating the seasons and it was okay; they'll get better as I do it more.  This was fun though, and I think the kids will look forward to celebrating the other seasons as they come.