Easter Preparation

I have been waiting and waiting AND waiting for the year that Sydney would be old enough to dye eggs.
I have so many fond memories of egg dying... dying eggs with my sister and cousins at my Mema's house, dying eggs again with my mom at home, dying eggs with the Junior High MYF for the church Easter egg hunt. I really just love dying Easter eggs. I even love the smell of vinegar by association.

So I was so excited that this year, now that Sydney is three and a half, we could dye eggs together.

We went ahead and made this a front porch project and she just picked the eggs up with her hands, so it was very messy, but fun and she did most of the work.

So egg dying was a big part of the preparation for Easter this year.

Another component was pinwheel seeds.

Sydney and I painted these lima beans and are pretending that they are pinwheel seeds. We are going to plant them on Good Friday and then enjoy seeing pinwheels on Easter Sunday. I won't do the Easter Bunny and I won't outright tell Sydney that the pinwheels will be growing from these seeds, but I sure enjoy telling her that we're going to pretend this together.

It's also been fun for me to collect pinwheels and making myself wait until Easter Sunday to see them all together in the plot has been nice.

But the more important part, I think, was making sure that we took the time to talk about the first Easter.

I have fallen in love with Patricia Pingry's "Story of..." series and highly recommend them. We had read The Story of Christmas back during Advent, and now in anticipation of Easter, we are reading The Story of Easter. The book talks about how Jesus was the Good Shepherd and how many people loved him and he loved all of us. But then it also says that some people did not love Jesus and they put him on a cross to die and that on Easter morning, Jesus was alive again and that's why we celebrate Easter.

I want Sydney to love all of the traditions that go with a holiday... the traditional (egg dying) and the less traditional (planting pinwheel seeds), but the most important thing to me is that she be built up in her faith and know that she is a child of God and that He loved her so much that He sent His only Son to die for her.