The Platt Family Blog: Easter

Easter is such a fun holiday, and certainly the most important holiday for Christians. It's the cornerstone of our faith. But I've learned that explaining it to children is quite difficult. Christmas is easy enough - they get the whole birthday concept, know what babies are, etc. so celebrating Jesus' birthday makes sense.

But Easter? First of all, I don't fully understand the concept of Easter myself. I think if we're really honest, none of us would admit to fully getting it. The God of the universe, in human form, endured the cross, and by doing so, somehow took upon himself all of the sin in all of the world. Oh, and then he was raised from the dead three days later. Mind blowing. Really.

So anyway, back to parenting and explaining this to my sweet three and one year-old. This year, I tried adding Resurrection Eggs to the Easter festivities mix. If you're not familiar with them, they're basically 12 plastic eggs with an item in each one that tell the Easter story. So I pull them out earlier this week and the kids just start tearing through them, looking at the "treasure" inside each one, while I'm frantically trying to keep up and explain what each "treasure" means. All the while I'm so upset they aren't opening them in the correct order and they're putting the items back in the wrong color egg. I'm not sure what I expected but clearly I expected too much. The second time I pulled them out I'd ask Warner what each item meant and he'd say "umm ... Jesus?" I'm thinking we'll revisit the Resurrection Eggs again next year.

Warner has caught on to a few spiritual concepts along the way however, and it blesses my heart to watch his little mind process what he's being told. This week he told me "Jesus is my friend and he got a boo-boo from the bad guys but then he was alive and went up, up, up in the sky in the clouds to heaben (heaven) and wants I go there with him too". And then last week as we walked into church he heard the worship music and said "they're celebrating Jesus in there, Mommy".

The kids made binoculars (out of toilet paper rolls) during MOPS on Monday. When I picked him up he said "look, Mom! I made noculars at MOPS and I can look for butterflies in them, or if I look waaaay up high, I might see Gob (God)".

And then a few nights ago before bed and after we read the Easter story in the Children's Bible:

Warner: Mommy, I don't think I want go heaven.
Me: Oh, I know it's a little scary but heaven will be wonderful. You'll be with Jesus and God and everyone you love - Mommy, Daddy, Maren ..."
Warner: (after thinking about it) Maybe I go heaven when I get big like you and Daddy. I want go heaven.

So we've got a long way to go on teaching the kids deep, meaningful, life-changing spiritual principles. In the meantime, they do understand eggs and candy, so we enjoyed both of those at Leslie and Bill's house in Lexington today.

We hunted eggs outside, between rain showers.

Warner got so many eggs he needed two baskets to hold them all. Maren took to the egg-hunting concept quite well too, so we'll be eating Easter candy until Halloween I imagine. Unless I take one for the team and help eat the candy, in which case it could last a week.

Maren would pull the candy out of an egg and if it needed to be unwrapped she'd find the nearest adult, hand them the candy, pat her chest to indicate herself, then point to her stomach. The adult would then unwrap the candy for her and she'd go on her merry way. No wonder she doesn't talk.