For whatever reason, I thought the girls would be lukewarm about dyeing easter eggs. I was wrong! They totally loved it. It was a fun little activity to have them color on the eggs with white crayon and then dip them in dye. Holly had a nice color theory lesson when she wanted to dip one of her eggs repeatedly in different colors. It really is the little things...

PS: if you're interested in a delicious Paleo egg salad recipe, here's one. 

Yesterday, we staged a small easter egg hunt for the girls. They each had one dozen eggs to find and their eggs were different colors. They did a great job at collecting only their own eggs and Conor did a great job hiding them according to their skill levels. It was just so fun to see their discovery. Greta "gets" hunting for eggs and is quite good at it and of course Holly definitely understands the game. Once all the eggs had been found, we dumped them out and let the girls have at it. Both Holly and Greta love chocolate. Greta quickly found all the eggs filled with chocolate by shaking them and ate her chocolate as fast as she could. To quote Greta in her deep, toddler voice, "CHOCOLATE!" This age is so fun. Conor and I loved remembering Holly at about the same age and her sheer enthusiasm and pure delight.

Details of our egg hunt: I filled a third of the eggs with stickers, a third with Annie's fruit snacks (3 per egg), and the last third had cadbury mini eggs (2 per egg). To collect the eggs, the girls used drawstring bags that I already had on hand. 

We're trying to keep our holidays simple. And while I thought that the amount of sweets we gave them wasn't all that much, we definitely could tell they had too much. Holly had a stomache ache and Greta had a hard time settling at bedtime. 

We didn't get a visit from the Easter bunny. I think we're going to nix that tradition. Partially it's out of selfishness for me, why should these make believe creatures take all the credit? And also because I think I would fill up an easter basket with a lot of stuff we don't need, which adds clutter to our home and I don't want that. I feel really satisfied by how this easter went down. We're trying hard to find a balance that's right for our family and even though it was a tough decision to not do anything from the easter bunny, or anything at all, besides an egg hunt, I'm really happy we did it.

On an unrelated to easter note, Holly is looking way too grown-up these days! Time is flying!

Conor built us a little square foot garden on our patio. We have a pretty big patio and it gets a lot of sun in the summertime so I'm hoping we'll have some success. I don't have much of a green thumb, but both my mother and my granny can make things grow, so hopefully, with lots of practice, I'll be able to make things grow too. We're all excited about the garden. However, it sure is taking a long time to get things planted. We want to do it with the girls, but doing things with the girls makes everything take forever to complete. So slowly, slowly we'll get our garden planted. Fortunately for us we have a looooong growth season. Hoping to fit in two summer crops before we start planting our winter veggies. 

PS: if you're interested in square foot gardening, I found this website really helpful. It gave me enough confidence to be decisive at Lowes and not be on the verge of tears. 

Having kids means there will be mess and disorganization. So to combat that, I made some divided baskets from Noodlehead. We recenly moved our toy kitchen into the real kitchen and the result was toy kitchen supplies all over my kitchen floor. These have been a great solution for that. I store the baskets on the rolling cart behind the kitchen. I made two for the kitchen out of linen and I used kona cotton to line them.

I made two more out of moustache fabric (couldn't resist). I plan on keeping one on our kids' table in the living room, mostly likely for duplo. And I'm not sure what I'll do about the second one. I might gift it... haven't decided. 

I really like these baskets. They were fairly simple to sew up. They required a lot of cutting though. I had to cut out lining, exterior fabric, interfeacing and fusible fleece. If I make these again, which I probably will, I'll try to use home dec weight fabric and I won't use fusible fleece. It was a pain to fuse so many things to linen because it has a loose weave. And the linen I ordered came horribly wrinkled so pressing it was a nightmare. And even with interfacign and fusible fleece, the linen is floppy. But, I like the look. I sewed a line down the middle of the exterior pocket on the moustache basket and I'm glad I did. It makes the pocket more stable.

If you're interested in making these, you'll need a half yard for the interior and a half yard for the exterior. If you want an exterior pocket, you'll need a little more than a half yard of each. Be prepared to cut and press a lot! But there's good news, they sew up fairly quickly. I was able to sew two in 1.5-2 hours (that doesn't include cutting and fusing). 

After we had such a lovely time walking Ranchos San Antonio on my birthday, we decided to take the kids. I'm trying to be more nature-minded and I want my family to go on nature walks together more often. Well, turns out, with children we covered a lot less ground and had a lot less adult conversation. Holly's legs hurt and she was hyper-focused on the pizza we were planning to eat for supper. In the end we covered about a mile. I'd say improvement is needed. But it's a start!

Another thing, taking pictures of these kiddos can be painful! So awkward. Sorry babies!