Happy Easter!

We wish you a wonderful Easter day.   We spent the morning at church praising God and giving thanks for having Jesus take the punishment for our sins.    After the church service, the youth hid some Easter eggs for the younger children.   It was a beautiful sunny morning.

And they are off!

We had our own egg hunt at home after Easter dinner.

I made Garlic Herb Boneless Lamb Roast.   I boned the lamb leg and butterflied it.   I then pounded the lamb and spread it with herbs.   After it had roasted for a while, I put a mixture of bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese and the herbs that I had stuffed it with.   It was wonderful.

Food news

When we were at St. Louis, we went to authentic Italian grocery store on The Hill.   I bought some linguine that came packaged in 5 pound amounts.

It was very long.   I had to break it to get it in my pot.   It would have been fun to keep it at this length though.

Last week we made some freezer meals for some families in need at our church.  Actually more than some.   More than 30 meals were made in about 2 1/2 hours.   We had 5 families working and we only took one short break.    The children really enjoyed it.

Amazingly we didn't spill anything on the carpeted floor!

Deb's birthday

Deborah got a three day birthday this year.   First was her real day down with Grandma and Grandpa and all the cousins.   Second was the day after we got back.   We didn't want to haul all the presents there and back so we gave her a couple on her real day and saved the rest for the Monday night party.  

Deborah designed this cake herself and did a lot of the decorating with the gumdrops.

She explained to me that the leaves on the flowers shouldn't exactly match since leaves in nature sometimes don't match.   She also put a flower petal down on the ground.   The green thing in the upper right corner is a kite.   I guess I have to work on my frosting kites a little better.

Deborah got her first Mars Mission Lego set and, as you can see, was thrilled by it.

Nathan found these rocks at an art fair last year and picked them out for her.   

Kirsten (Deb's daughter) got a new outfit and some shoes.   The poor thing had been going barefoot since Christmas.  What Grandma didn't know is that Deb had some shoes that were almost the same style!

And what was the third day?   Well, it was the next morning when we had our traditional chocolate chip pancakes.

Catch up (again)

I'm back!   We took a short trip to see the grandparents and I got behind on my blog.   Baseball practice started yesterday so I may get more and more behind.   They just don't have wifi at the park yet!

So I thought I'd catch you up on some of the activities we've done in the last couple of weeks.    First we went to see some friends who do maple syrup in a big way.   They have a sugar shack and everything.   The picture below shows the three big pans of sap boiling.   It was pretty warm inside the shack, but hard to see for all the steam.

We also made our annual trip to the Butterfly house.   Stephen was just thrilled to get his favorite butterfly (the Red Postman) to land on him.

Deborah at her piano.   She is very diligent about practicing.   I took this picture so I could remember the time that her feet didn't touch the floor.

Aaron made a race track for the myriad of matchbox cars we have.   Then he meticulously raced most of them around and around.   There were a lot of crashes.