Playing Birthday

One of Kaitlyn and William's favorite games is to play "birthday". They love to pretend it's their birthday and have a party. They always want to have a cake with balloons and presents. Well, I usually let them pretend to make a cake and if we have some balloons, I'll blow a few up. They'll sometimes get their own toys and wrap them up in paper and give them to each other. It's very cute. Well this morning, because they play this so often, I decided that we'd make our own little mini cakes together. I got out a cake mix and used my mini bread pans to let them bake their own individual little cakes. Since they love "sprinkles", I let them put some into the cake batter before we baked the cakes.

While the cakes were baking we made some frosting. Because the cakes were so small, they only baked for about 20 minutes, and they only took a few more minutes to cool. So we were able to get to work on the frosting right away. They even wanted to put candles on the cakes and sing "happy birthday".

Another fun activity we did this morning -that teaches all sorts of good stuff to little hands and little minds,- was making an owl "softie". I let Kaitlyn pick out the fabric she wanted and then let her trace and cut the pattern peices. Then I sewed it up for her really quick, and let her stuff it. Fun!! I think this little owl looks like "neopolitan ice cream". Kaitlyn has named her "Owlie".

Resurrection Eggs

On Easter Sunday, the primary children walked through 12 different scenes in the last hours of the Savior's life. After opening excercises, we dismissed the the classes one by one to go out on a "Resurrection Egg" hunt. Outside in the hallway, were 12 giant eggs sitting in front of 12 different rooms (These eggs were huge, like 2 feet long and a foot wide, and they opened up in the middle just like the small eggs) I got them from hobby lobby). The class would go to each egg, one at a time, and open the egg, and then go inside the room to learn about what they found in the egg. Once inside the room, a member of the ward greeted the children by simply reading a scripture. The rooms were set up with pictures and little bit of scenery to help it look like the place where the scripture for each egg took place. Then, each child got a smaller version of the item that was in the large egg to put in their own egg. Each child had their own set of 12 eggs with scriptures on the outside of each egg. They filled their eggs as they walked through the 12 different scenes. Some of the ward members who helped us in the scenes were dressed up. It was very effective, even with the littlest ones.
(The pictures below are the baskets full of the mini versions of the items we had to give to each child. There was of course only one of each of these items in the 12 large eggs outside the rooms. )

1.Matthew 26:36-39:36

2. Matthew 26:14-15
3. Matthew 27:1-2
4 Matthew 27:22-24
5. Matthew 27:28-30
6. Matthew 27:31-35
7. Matthew 27:35-37
8. Matthew 27;50,51, 54 9.Matthew 27:57-60

10.Matthew 27:62-666 11. Mark 16:1-2

12. Luke 24:1-6

(This egg was empty, because the tomb was empty.)

This is a picture of our Bishop in front of the empty tomb from last year when we were able to do it on Good Friday and set up an actual tomb. We even had a CD with nature sounds playing in the background. This year, our Bishop just stood outside with a picture of the Savior and a small tomb that I have from a miniature resurrection scene.