Velikden/Easter... 2012!

"Velikden" is "Easter" in Bulgarian. It literally means "Great Day," and I think that's the neatest thing. What a great day it was! THE greatest day! Languages are pretty cool.  Great Day. Easter. We had a nice Easter this year.  Really, I should say Easters... with an 's' on the end. Western Easter was the Sunday before Orthodox Easter, and we are very happy that there were TWO Easters because the Easter Bunny's helpers were slackers and were not ready by Western Easter day.  We had our second Sunday of General Conference (here in Bulgaria the recorded General Conferences are shown over two Sundays, instead of just one weekend) on Western Easter, and that was really nice.  And then we talked a lot about the reason for Easter, Christ's resurrection.  As we had been doing, I will add, in a non-slacker way.  But we didn't do the Easter Bunny thing until the next week.  We dyed eggs the evening before.

 See?

Grandma Buttons sent a little monster kit, and Bran and Nuala loved making little egg monsters.  (They were not so enthusiastic when I said Sunday, "Okay, we're having egg salad for dinner! Let's peel your monsters' faces off and chop them up!"  But they did love eating them.)

 The classic Nuala picture.

Nuala left the Easter Bunny a nice drawing, and a pipe cleaner decoration.  This girl is addicted to pipe cleaners.  "Decorations" sprout up all over the place -- hanging off cabinet handles, doorknobs, chairs, lamps, heaters, taped to the walls...

Look at these cuties! I'm really gonna try next year to buy matching-ish Easter outfits.  And do Christmas cards.  And learn Japanese.

And they're off!  We did the Easter egg hunt after church.  The Easter Bunny takes our bag of empty eggs each year and puts candy in them and then hides them.  Unfortunately for our kids, plastic eggs are hard to come by here (or we don't know where to look), so they each got to find eight eggs.  Fortunately for our kids, they don't know any different (or DIDN'T, at that point).  And our yard is really big so the hunt was still challenging enough.

Bran Man helping Maeve get an egg out of the tree.  He's a sweet bro.  He and Nuala zipped around finding their allotted number of eggs, and Maeve... she wasn't too keen on zipping. It was slightly soggy outside, and so the eggs were wet and had bits of grass and what-not sticking to them.  Maeve was unimpressed.  Kept picking them up with just two fingers, a look of disgust on her face...

Well, that's not a look of disgust.  She was excited sometimes.  When the egg was clean.

Full baskets.  It helps that their baskets are seriously small.

Zachariah and me. In case you couldn't tell.

Nuala on our Easter walk that evening.  The Easter Bunny brought them little watering cans, so they all came on our walk, too.  That was not a brilliant idea, since Maeve dumped her water out pretty immediately and then was pretty annoyed that her can was empty.  Luckily we walk by a stream.  And later another stream/gutter, so she did get a couple of refills.  Which were promptly dumped out.

Honestly, we almost got THREE Easters, because the Saturday AFTER Orthodox Easter was the Embassy Easter party.  We were pretty excited because the last two years it's been on a Sunday, so we'd never been.  Maeve was not excited to be by the Easter Bunny.  I know... you can't tell.  I told her if she wanted the bubbles and marshmallows he was handing out, she had to be in the picture, so she suffered through it.

Face painting made her happier.  She got a flower on her face. Z asked if he could touch it, and she said, "Daddy, NOT touch it! Touch flower my jacket."  So yeah, the face flower was pretty important.

The party was at the DCM's house (Deputy Chief of Mission -- 2nd in command to the ambassador), and it was, of course, a huge, lovely place with a big yard.  Kids 5 and under got to "hunt" first, in their own designated section.  It was kinda embarrassing, sending our gigantic twins out with all the littler kids, but hey, they ARE five. And everyone got a ton of candy.  The eggs for their age group were just strewn all across the lawn. Quite, QUITE different than the hunt in our backyard. Eight eggs a-piece? Pshaw. Try eight-HUNDRED. Yeah, not really, but seriously, more than eight. 

Towards the end the thrill of the "chase" was wearing off.  We have loads o' candy at home now.  There wasn't a huge turnout at the party, maybe because it was raining off and on?  Who knows. It was fun.

Maeve, again, was not too worried about running around and gathering up the eggs.  See how gingerly she's picking this one up? Because it's wet and had grass stuck to it.  At first I was all, "Maeve! Hurry! Let's get this one!" and I was getting all antsy for her to pick up the pace and COMPETE!  I had to slow myself down and let her enjoy it the way she was enjoying it.  And she still got plenty of candy.   

N&B and the Bunny with some of their haul. 

The DCM's hubby is the fellow in charge of organizing the embassy trips to Lopyan orphanage, and the orphanage bussed in a group of the kids!  I guess they did this the years before, but we never went so I was surprised to see several sweet faces that we knew showing up.  Here's Petranka.  The kids had a lot of fun, and they were happy to see us there, too.  One of the other boys we play with a lot gave me one of the little crafts he made, and I thought that was really sweet.  I will miss going to see them! I can only talk to them a little bit, and I'm embarrassed to say I don't know many of their names (because there are so many of them, and they say them fast when I ask, and it's a system overload.... yeah, excuses) but I know their faces and they know us and I will miss them! One more trip before we go...

But yes, that's our Easter(s)!  And our trees have blossomed and are now almost green, and the weather is beautiful, and we can't believe that in less than two months we'll be leaving our lovely mountain! The kids and I cleaned out some of the toy bins today. Now I just need to do the rest of the house... one of the benefits of moving every 2-3 years... you get to do the purge a little more often than you normally might!