Easter Recap

I love Easter Sunday.  It's become one of my favorite holidays to host dinner.  It's a lot of work to have it at my house, but I really enjoy doing it so I keep volunteering myself.  This year I decided to do most of the work for the party on Saturday so that I could enjoy myself more on Sunday.  I think it worked pretty well.  Maybe too well.  I'm kicking myself this morning because I had so much fun at my own party that I didn't even think to once pull my camera out.  Maybe I'll have to invite everyone back to recreate the day.  I keep thinking that I really need more pictures of the people in my life and less pictures of the crafty details.  I figure in 20 years I'm not going to care that much about the things, and I'm going to regret not having pictures of the people.  I at least made an effort to take some family pictures in our Easter clothes after church.  I even put myself in a few of them (something I really don't like doing very often these days).  And yes, I realize we are wearing Christmas colors.  I tried to find other outfits, but this is just what I liked the most for everyone.

We did have our neighbor volunteer to take a family one after he heard me yelling at my kids to, "act normal!"  Because this is how my kids act when we attempt to take pictures.

Like this.

 And like this.

And like this.

This was probably the best we got of "normal."

Here's the one family shot.  I don't love it, and really hesitate posting it.  But, I'm trying to keep it real, and real means I don't always look my best, and Trav has this thing where he squints in 85% of the pictures we take.  I did wear cute red high heels to church, but you can see that I barely made it in the door with them still on, let alone the rest of the day. 

But that's us.  

And here's the only party pics I took, a few crafty details before the guests arrived.  After the guests came I lost my brain. 

And here's a close up of Hallie's brooch.  I didn't make her dress. I had a really hard time finding a dress for her that I liked.  I just feel like now that she's grown out of the little, little girl stuff I don't like the things I find in the 7-14 girls section.  I don't know why they try to make the little girls look like pre-teens these days.  I wish they'd take the littler girls dresses and continue them in the bigger sizes.  Maybe I'm not looking in the right stores.  I guess if I really want what I have in my head I'm going to need some more sewing lessons.  This was my attempt to make the dress I found Springier.  

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter!