Easter Table

I made the flowers for our Easter Table this year. The tulips on the table are made out of tissue paper, wires, crepe paper and flower tape! Hard to believe they are made of paper - they were so beautiful this year. I also made home-made Chocolate Easter Eggs and Stephanie made the candles out of eggshells and miniature daffodils! St



I also made daffodils out of crepe paper and decorated the tables for a church function. They, too were beautiful... thus the attached picture - just so you can "oooh" "aaah" with me!

Worley Easter Outfits

Sara and Chris could not be with us for Easter, but she sent me some pictures of the boys in their Easter outfits! We sure have good looking grandkids, don't we? It is always so hard to celebrate holidays when all of the children are not home. Sara is so good at keeping us with updated pictures and phone calls. We get to talk to Grant and Mason every day.

Jaybin at Easter

Jaybin thinks he is Mr Cool. He also wants to be superman, batman or spiderman. We had quite the argument as to whether Batman can fly - and definately spiderman flies!

We always enjoy Jaybin, he loves to have fun. He spent alot of our Easter day hike throwing sticks in the stream (while playing "pooh sticks") and rolling down a big hill in his Easter clothes, getting them filthy dirty!

Kinsen's Easter Outfit

When our children were small, every year Steve would take them shopping and buy them an Easter outfit. Steve took great delight in finding a new outfit for each of the kids and they always looked forward to their day of shopping with Daddy.

We take great delight that Jason carries on that tradition. Jason took Kinsen out shopping for an Easter dress. She is getting so big, and this year they found a "big girl" dress that went below her knee. However, I think the dress is one of my favorites. When I was a little girl I had a green and white dress that was my absolute favorite because it had a skirt on it that when I twirled, the dress would flair out. Kinsen had a dress very similar to that dress...and yes...she couldn't help herself...

It is a joy to watch Kinsen grow up. Every year she takes on more responsibility in the family. This year she made the Easter bunny salads, peeled the carrots and helped me wash and dry the dishes.

Jason, Kendra, Kinsen, Jaybin, Stephanie and Daniel came to Kokomo on the Saturday before Easter to celebrate Easter with Stephen and I. We had a wonderful time. Grandma (that's me) organized all kinds of "egg" games. We played Capture the Egg (like capture the flag, only with eggs), Egg Roll with your nose, Egg toss game, and "the Great Egg Drop". We had an easter egg hunt and ate Egg salad sandwiches, devilled eggs, decorated egg sugar cookies...

We spent at least 3 hours playing "the Great Egg Drop". This game is played by placing all kinds of things (like duct tape, cotton balls, baby diapers, yarn, tissue paper, small boxes, toilet paper tubes, cool whip containers -- actually anything I could find around the house that would help keep an egg from breaking while being dropped from the top of the ladder).

Jaybin and Jason's Egg drop team was the only team that did not break any eggs - the rest of us broke an egg when we dropped it from the top of the ladder. We had no idea that Jason was an engineer, but he really came up with grand engineering ideas on how to NOT break an egg! Kendra and Kinsen were always the first ones ready to drop their egg and had to wait for the rest of us. We made a bullseye that gave more points the farther from the ladder you dropped your egg. Jason/Jaybin were ahead of all of us until the very last drop. Kinsen threw her last egg in desperation of needing points and her invention landed on the X - which gave them 300points! They won! Little brother, Jaybin, was very disappointed and argued that he should get a prize because he didn't break any eggs.

Kinsen asked me to make her an octopus costume for her 1st Grade school play entitled "Commotion in the Ocean". I had alot of fun making the costume. It was purple with 8 legs and lots and lots of large sequins shaped like bubbles in green and purple! She looked adorable. I left my camera battery charger in Florida while we visited Sara last month and my battery ran out while we were taking pictures so I don't have a picture of the octopus costume. I hope Kendra's pictures turn out so I can have a picture of it.

Easter Holy Week

Tonight we just finished the Maundy Thursday service where we commemorate the Last Supper before Christ's cruxificion. Stephen preached on how we get so familiar with the hymns, the liturgy, the message of Easter that Easter becomes mundane and we often loose our joy. It was a very creative service. We didn't sing hymns...we read them... He preached on 2 Kings chapter 6 this really bizarre story about a man who lost the cutting edge of his axe in the water and thus lost his purpose, joy and power...we too loose our cutting edge - all that we have to do is acknowledge our loss of joy, and take it back...God will give us joy again...He will restore our cutting edge, our joy, our Holy Spirit power.

My joy in the Lord is strong. Christ is gifting me for service all the time, and I am happy to do His work. I love Him more than anything. My cutting edge is still there, but for some reason I feel overwhelmed and aimless. I want a fresh new outlook on life, I feel so stale. My love for the Lord is solid. My joy in the Lord is evident. My peace is there, I have many friends, but my heart feels lonely and it has for quite some time. I ask myself why I feel so alone and why I want to be alone. I have no answers. I spend alot of time with the Lord...so that is not even my answer. I guess I will just wait but I would rather be "doing" something about this. Waiting seems so stale too.

What do you do when you feel so alone, so stale, so weary of the same old thing? What do you do when you want something to challenge, excite and put a new perspective on your outlook on life? Perhaps this is what they call that "Mid-life crisis"! Or maybe we are still recuperating from Steve's heart attack. He has so many limitations now, perhaps we are just mourning the loss of vitality and energy. Perhaps we have faced mortality and life has just become more serious for us?