Easter 2015

On Saturday morning my Dad had some up-front seats for conference so Dave and I accompanied them on a little double date.

It was such a great session.  I LOVED Linda Burton’s strength in hers.  Raising four girls I want them to be inspired by strong women like her.  You can listen to it HERE.  I also loved Elder Clayton‘s talk and especially Elder Perry‘s about strong families.  You can listen to any of them by clicking HERE.

The spirit was thick in that beautiful place that morning.

Loved sharing it with these three:

We did a little shopping between sessions:

Grace and Claire practiced their Chinese with these cute girls from Shanghai at H&M (there were so many people from all over the world filling up that whole Temple Square area).

The boys went to the Priesthood session on Saturday night (with my brother-in-law and nephews too):

While we girls met up with my sister and cousins and their kids.

We met up at Arella, a delicious pizza place my cousin Lindsay created (check it out HERE…if you’re ever in the area check it out, you won’t be disappointed!).

So fun to get all these cute girls reacquainted:

And I adore each of these wonderful women.

Before we go into Easter I wanted to post some of what we did for Holy Week before we left and some thoughts I had on that.  We did our traditional yellow Holy Week stuff (back here), but added a few things like reenacting Palm Sunday with palm fronds from our neighbors.

(apparently the “donkey” was tired…)

Loved watching especially those two because they were so excited about it (we combined Thursday and Friday since there was no school on Friday).

There is so much to do around Easter to celebrate the miraculous resurrection of our Savior, but I loved this post from my friend-I’ve-never-actually-met-but-who-I’ve-emailed-a-bunch-because-we- lived-in-China-at-the-same-time:

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

We can get SO scattered trying to do all this stuff to make Easter (and any holiday for that matter) more meaningful which is important and wonderful.

But the most wonderful thing of all is for our children to know that we love them, and that we love the Savior.  And that we BELIEVE that he gave His life for us and that the Atonement can save us.

Period.

If all this other stuff fits in and works, great.  Awesome.  Wonderfully enriching.  But sometimes it’s so easy to get caught so much up in it all that we forget to just love those kids of ours and weave the Savior into all that we do in life.  Not just at Easter.

(We were a little scrunched…do you like Elle’s bed in the hallway?)

After the kids found their baskets we had a special devotional to finish off the last two days of Holy Week.  We read the scriptures and talked about how we want to live our lives so that we recognize His voice when we hear it.  Whether it’s to be kinder to a lonely friend at school or which job to take in the future, or whether it’s just trying to whisper loving words, I hope that we will recognize His hand in our lives.

Because it’s there.

He lives.

I believe that with all my heart.

That little devotional was probably my favorite part of the whole weekend.

Even despite the fact that it was followed by an Easter egg hunt outside in the wind filled with children fighting so I didn’t even get any pictures (I did get some of the squabbling on video though…maybe I should post that…:)

My dear Mom helped us have our traditional Conference Cinnamon rolls (with a little help from Rhodes):

We listened to part of the first session on the lawn by the temple.

And had a lunch with my sister and her family.

Love her…so fun to get caught up although we never have quite enough time.

Love these cousins:

Then we all headed over for the last session of Conference:

We split up because my Dad helped us get a few more upfront seats:

My parents sat up there in that top balcony with the rest of the kids and some of Saren’s.

And then we scrambled to pack up and head home.

I get the middle seat now because I am the shortest…weird.

And the opportunity to reflect on that glorious occasion in a heightened way this year.He lives.

And because He lives everything changes.

How I hope I can try to be more like Him in what I do each day.  I hope each of us in our family can let what happened and what we heard up at that conference affect us more in our daily lives.