Easter Weekend

We had a wonderfully long Easter weekend because Good Friday and Easter Monday are federal holidays, meaning, days that don't count against vacation days! We had talked about trying to go somewhere, but elected to instead stay close to home in the hopes of doing some nearby hiking. However, the weather did not cooperate for hiking since it was either raining or snowing! Here's a few 'before' and 'after' shots:

Before Easter weekend it was beautiful and sunny with flowers blooming:

Flower boxes in Egg.

Flowering trees by our house.

Close up of the trees.

Playing outside in the nice weather :).

 Easter morning photos:

Snowy trees!

Quite pretty actually :)

Handsome little guy with his first car.

He got an ouch and was showing me where I needed to kiss it. Don't worry, my kiss fixed it.
 I've always wanted that particular Mom superpower :).

Cheesy baby on Easter morning.

My handsome boys :).

We discovered by accident that Carsten LOVES my hand broom. He would not let it out of his sight and he actually had a bit of a melt-down when we took away because it was bath time. We did tell him that he could have it again in the morning - lo and behold the next morning it was the first thing he asked for (it was put away in the closet in the hopes that he had forgotten it). I actually ended up buying a new one just so he could play with it because it kind of grossed me out that he wanted played with my relatively dirty one. Here's a photo of Carsten on the first day of his broom obsession:

Let me help Mom!

Since the weather was rotten, we had mostly family time in the house, but we did do a few things over the weekend as well. Andy took Carsten to the zoo in the morning on Friday so I could work on my papers from graduate school. On Saturday, we did some organizing of shelves and packed the first of many bags to send back home. We went to church on Sunday and got to talk with family back home, and then on Monday we all went to the indoor swimming pool in the morning for some family time. All in all, it was nice to have an enforced 'staycation' so we could get some things done around the house and have some low-stress family time. We love family time!