Spring Chicken

A few weeks ago, my friend Medora stopped by with her daughter Addy and a few of her newest chicks (she's become something of a "Chicken Lady" and now has several dozen egg layers). There is nothing like a baby chick to ring in the spring season.

Cally thought they were pretty cool.


And it got me thinking about how we'd "celebrate" Easter this year. The thing is, I usually don't even know when Easter is. We don't get any extra time off from school and the day changes every year. I don't think I've actually celebrated the holiday since I was living at home with my parents (20 years ago!). When I heard the rest of my family was getting together for the holiday, it dawned on me that maybe this Easter celebration thing might be fun to embrace. I've never been a huge fan of the Christian Easter story-- the whole "rebirth" of a human is too far fetched for me. I do however, like the idea of celebrating spring and it's rebirth that is represented by baby animals, spring flowers, and longer periods of daylight.


Our lovely friends, Tim, Sophia, and Beckett visited during the early part of the weekend. Tim and John are old friends and it's been fun to get our kids together over the past year.


Since we had another child in the house, I decided to do what I loved doing on Easter-- dye eggs and hunt for them (though I have no idea what this has to do with the Christian Easter story). In any case, I bought a PAAS egg decorating kit for $1.99, boiled a bunch of eggs and set the kids up for some egg dyeing fun. Beckett is a year older than Cally, so he sort of "got it" a little more than she did. Even so, they both had a ball. Cally took to the dyeing thing like she'd been doing it for years. Beckett was a little more delicate than she was:


Tim and I hid both the dyed eggs and some plastic ones in the upper field. Cally wasn't sure what to think as we prepped the kids for the hunt:


But she figured it out pretty quickly:


She lost interest after about four eggs were found, but basket in hand, she was one proud little girl!


Since Saturday was such an amazing day (record breaking temps in the 80's), we decided to head to the slopes. However, as is commonly the case when the Abbott's try to get out of the house in too much of a hurry, an important bag with our ski clothing in it was left on the porch. However, it was almost 80 degrees on the mountain and I wasn't going to miss this "once in a decade" kind of ski day, so I made the executive decision to hit the mountain anyway-- jean skirt and all:


Even Cally got her skis on for a little bit:


I wondered if we needed to do the whole Easter Bunny visit thing for Cally on Sunday, but John quickly reminded me that Cally wouldn't have a clue about the whole thing, doesn't eat candy, and doesn't need any more "stuff". So, we opted to go with our annual tradition....... for the past five years, John and I have met up with friends at Stowe where we dress up in 80's ski wear and tailgated in the parking lot. While not necessarily the most child-centered Easter celebration, we decided to introduce Cally to the fun at an early age. How could we pass up a gorgeous spring skiing day?

We didn't rush out the door in the morning and managed to get Cally into a pretty cute Bunny dress handed down from cousin Kesley:

Once we got up to Stowe, we set up a base camp for tailgating in the parking lot:


It doesn't look like there's much snow, but there was plenty on the mountain. In years past, people got pretty decked out with the 80's attire. This year the efforts were not match by those of the past for most of us:


Until Jen Baer showed up. She definitely get's an "A" for effort in the costume department:

While the parent's had a great time skiing, Cally had a great time hanging out with the boys at the "base camp".


And I'm hoping it won't be long before she's skiing like her three year old buddy, Chase!


While we made a sort of half-hearted effort to celebrate Easter with Cally, I'm hoping we can have many more weekends to celebrate the rebirth of spring like this again.