We had a nice Easter this year with just our family and Grandma. We did quite a few fun activities leading up to Easter Sunday that I wanted to share with you and at the end of this post is a great recipe to try for using up some of those hard boiled eggs!
For the last several years I’ve done Resurrection Eggs with the kids for the 12 days leading up to Easter Sunday. We made the eggs a few years ago and have been re-using them each year. You can see our egg carton in the bottom right of the pic below. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s a great way to reinforce the true meaning of Easter. This year I hid two eggs each day – one was the Resurrection egg with the symbol and message and the other had a small piece of candy in it for each kid. The kids loved looking for the eggs each day. This year E and I decided to mount the symbols and messages on a painted piece of cardboard instead of just putting them back in the eggs. E and I also put together a great Easter Lapbook (I downloaded the FREE Easter Lapbook). I find lapbooks to be a great teaching tool for a variety of subjects and you can make them as simple or fancy as you want. You can see the outside of ours in the bottom left side of the first pic and the inside of the book in the second pic.
Claire and I made hard boiled eggs using this recipe for Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs. She’s been into wearing swim goggles around the house and apparently thought they were necessary for working with the eggs. 
Of course we decorated our hard boiled eggs. Both kids participated, but I found this pic especially funny as Claire decided to spend most of the time painting her hand instead of the eggs. We’ve had the book In Elmo’s Easter Parade for several years and this year the kids were inspired by the book to create their own Easter bonnets. We hit up the dollar store for cheap hats and items to use for decorations. They had fun making them look silly and then wearing them around the house and outside.
After church on Sunday the kids did an egg hunt around our yard. They had a great time running around looking for the eggs daddy hid for them. It was the perfect day for an outdoor egg hunt.
We didn’t have the traditional ham for our Easter dinner since none of us really care too much for it (other than Grandma), so the kids chose pancakes and bacon instead. We don’t eat bacon very often but I got a pack of uncured bacon recently on Manager’s Special and tried out making it in the oven (see this recipe for Crispy Oven-Baked Bacon). The bacon turned out great and it was so much easier and created less mess than cooking it in the microwave or frying pan.
I’m sure many of you, like me, have some leftover hard boiled eggs you are looking to use up. Egg salad has never been a favorite of mine but Claire and I made a twist on the traditional with this Smashed Chickpea Guacamole Egg Salad and thought it turned out pretty good. Below are some pics of her at work. We liked the addition of chickpeas and using avocado instead of the traditional mayo. We also used some plain Greek yogurt in place of the “optional” mayo called for in the recipe. My little helper made me laugh when she said “WOW! Look at that seed” when we cut open the avocado and “I’m so proud” when she was chopping the avocado by herself with a knife (of course very carefully supervised).
I hope you all had a nice Easter too!
enspire balance 