Easter!

So. . . Easter! It's my favorite.  It is one of my goals to make Easter the biggest deal of the year in our home, even more than Christmas.  Because, well, what it celebrates IS the biggest deal.  Which is tricky, because I love my Christmas too, and it is way easier to find fun Christmas-y things.  But we're getting there!  Noah was so excited for Easter Sunday!  He asked for weeks if it was here yet and the night before he didn't actually go to sleep until like an hour and a half after his usual bedtime...  When I would stick my head in to check on him and remind him to go to sleep he said, "Happy Easter!  Happy Easter!  Happy Jesus Easter!"
Now we don't celebrate just the day of or right before, oh no, we have about a month of Easter-y goodness.  Of course my obsession resource of Pinterest helped out a ton in finding ideas.  (You can check out my Easter board here.)  The main thing we spread throughout the month was work on our Easter tree.  Most days we added a new egg ornament with a different name of Jesus on it that we learned about.  Noah loved this and asked often to make a "Jesus egg." 
(I got this idea from a pin I saw of doing something similar with Christmas ornaments for Advent, and am pretty proud that I thought to adapt it for Easter. :)  Plastic eggs work great for this because they have two small holes in the top, so I just stuck some thread through and we were good to go.  Noah was thrilled that he got to use my Sharpies to decorate them.  Sometimes we did other activities that went with the name for that day, like decorating a candle for "light of the world" or making bread for "bread of life."  

 Almost all of them were actual biblical names of Jesus, but when Noah had another idea we would throw that it there too, like "super hero."  We did a super hero unit in Sunday School and he loves the song "Jesus Is My Superhero." :)

We loosely used some of these ideas for Holy Week.  The Jesus Storybook Bible has a great story about Jesus being the Servant King and washing the disciples feet.  We painted with our feet and then washed them for each other.  Noah loved the painting but we found out he is not a fan of touching other peoples feet... oh well. :)  Although a few days later he told me to put my feet in the tub while he was taking a bath and proceeded to wash them for me while quoting "I am doing this because I love you" and other parts of the Last Supper. 
We also worked on our Easter garden throughout the week.  We made a salt dough tomb like we did last year, but couldn't go outside to get dirt because we still have two feet of snow!  We used potting soil from a bag and actually tried to grow some grass.  We got a few random long blades of grass growing, but I don't think I have the greenest thumb.
There is an idea I have seen on a couple of my favorite blogs of putting rocks in an Easter basket and talking about how sin is like rocks in our hearts, and then replacing them with gifts and putting the rocks in a new basket with Jesus' name on it to talk about how he took our sins and gives us good things.  I didn't know if this would be over Noah's head or not but decided to try it and see what happened.  He didn't seem to be getting into it as we were getting the rocks ready, but as I was tucking him in that night he said, "I think Jesus is going to get that sin out of my basket.  I'll check in the morning."
So on Easter morning he woke up to our Easter garden looking like this (we had put Jesus in the tomb on Good Friday):

And his Easter basket with gifts and the "sin" rocks in another "Jesus" basket.  Then he had the idea to take the rocks and throw them outside, which is actually kind of an even better illustration!

And now this post is getting pretty long so I might have to do a Part 2...  Happy Jesus Easter!