Easter 2015

Easter 2015 –

When somebody says "Easter Sunday" what images do you conjure up? Sitting in a church listening to a sermon? Coloring Easter eggs? Searching for chocolate bunnies and colorful Easter baskets that darn clever Easter Bunny has hidden? Or maybe getting together with family for a fine feast of cold cut ham, hard boiled eggs, and freshly grated horseradish on thick slices of gorgeous, fluffy challah bread. Mmmmmm….

That's not the way we spent our Easter this year!

Instead we spent our Easter Sunday waiting in frustratingly loooooooooooong lines trying to get to the top of Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie…trying not to pull our hair out.

*********(heavy) sigh************

And actually, frustrating as that might seem, I appreciate the time we got to spend together as a family. Even if it seemed like we were all going to melt down and start either crying or laughing in hysteria at our amusing situation. (It's bad enough to wait in a slow-moving line for 2 hours but it's another thing to feel like you're part of the amusement…I know that many of you can't/don't understand this but we are really sick and tired of having people take photos of us as if we're some kind of freak show. We're just normal people…our hair, skin and eye colors may be different but we're really the same. And we'd really appreciate being treated as humans. Okay, rant over and out.)

ANYWAY…

getting back to Easter!

The Easter Bunny was quite clever and left small little gifts on the girls' beds. The girls discovered them shortly after we arrived home in the weeeeeee hours of Monday morning. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to take a photo of them giggling with glee at the gifts. The Easter Bunny left them Nerf dart guns!!!!

Yippeeeeee!!!!!

***************************************

Mark teaches an informal English class at his work that is open to all employees. Sometimes we try to help him do something fun for our special holidays so this year the girls and I helped him set up an Easter egg coloring event the week BEFORE our Zhangjiajie trip. I hard-boiled about 60 eggs, baked a batch of iced sugar cookies in bunny shapes, and gathered together various art supplies, food dye, vinegar, cups, markers, and anything else I could think of for this party. (oh, PAPER TOWELS!)

I had so much fun watching all of Mark's coworkers really get into coloring the eggs! I wish, wish, wish I had photos of all of their eggs – they really got quite creative! Annika, Ava, and I also tried our hand at coloring a few eggs. I tried a new method of coloring the eggs with Sharpie markers and then dropping rubbing alcohol on the eggs to create a watercolor effect. Didn't exactly work the way I thought it should. Annika had fun with the Sharpie markers as well.

The English class getting down to business:Ready, set ….

Look at them go!

Annika's egg:

My "watercolor" egg attempt:

I tried using my tiny bit of Chinese to explain about the food dye and why we use white vinegar and boiling water to color the eggs. I think I actually succeeded too! (wow!)

Thank you to Mark's English class to allow us to come in and share this fun experience! We really enjoyed it!!!!

***************************************

The trees and shrubs our blooming!!!!

Our family's Easter eggs. This year I used the German powdered egg dye along with the liquid food dye (that's what we used in the English class). I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the German dyes! That blue is really TRUE blue.

More beautiful flowering trees:

And sweet tiny violets!

This year we had a series of fortunate and happy (for us!) coincidences that really made this Easter extra special for us. My friend Rachel, who used to live in China but has since returned back to Dubuque, creates and sells beautiful candy bouquets. MY good fortune (sadly, not hers as I'm sure you'll understand) is that her husband was traveling to China over Easter and had room in his suitcase to haul these two lovely baskets filled with goodies for the girls. All I had to do was assemble them: