Our Easter Family Celebration

This year for Easter I was really looking forward to having a nice family celebration. I am forever forgetting to ask our family friend who sends us packages to send some of those plastic eggs to use in an Easter egg hunt. But this year, I remembered! I also asked for some small toys like jacks, yo-yos, bouncy balls, etc., to put in the kids baskets and in some of the eggs. Well, as usual my friend didn't let me down and she sent a generous amount of goodies, including Reese's peanut butter eggs for me! This gets her major brownie points since they are my favorite candy! (I did share them with my hubby by the way.)

Add the goodies my friend sent to the goodies David and I were able to find here in Russia and the kids had some pretty good looking Easter baskets! I was so excited to find the cute metal basket on the right of the picture below for Rebekah here. It has a pretty picture of a cottage, flowers, and white bunnies all around it. You see, here in Russia you usually have to look for baskets because Easter baskets are not a part of the Russian Easter traditions. This explains why Ryan and Timothy received smaller baskets since we only found the ones with handles later and they were really expensive!

Ryan's, Timothy's, and Rebekah's Easter baskets

The kids were so excited to see what we had been hiding from them that they could hardly sleep the night before Easter!  It had been a while since they had received an Easter basket for Easter and they were so thrilled with their gifts and candy. If there is one thing I love about my children it is their thankful hearts for everything we give them. We can buy them new socks and they thank us for days! It is so sweet.

The kids discovering their treasures.

Ryan's reaction for the camera when he saw that he received a blow gun and darts.

Another deisre of mine was to be able to buy three pairs of much needed dress shoes for the kids to be able to wear on Easter Sunday. We found out from another missionary family that one of the children's stores here was having a sale on shoes. A few weeks later, we were able to go and see what kind of selection they had and we purchased three pairs of dress shoes for the usual price of ONE pair! Hallelujah! I was so excited. It doesn't take much for me to be thankful most times either. I love it when God blesses us and provides even in the little things!

New shoes even though they already look a bit dusty. :)

After we returned home from the Easter services at Krasnoyarsk Baptist Church, which you can read about on our ministry blog, David and I hid the eggs for the great egg hunt on our property. Unfortunately the temperatures which had been in the low +30's Celsius the day before, had dropped to +12 Celsius on Easter Sunday so we had to dress a bit warmer for the hunt. 

Yes, there is a postal box from the States hanging on our future fence posts. David hung it there.

And they're off! 

Don't you just love Ryan's outfit?

Beka finding her pink and purple eggs.

Timothy showing off his eggs.

Once the eggs were all found, they all ran inside to find out what other surprises awaited them.

Timothy opening each egg.

Ryan was excited to find a parachute guy inside one of his eggs.

Rebekah found lots of candy.

Another fun thing we were able to do for Easter thanks to my faithful friend back in the States was to make Jello jigglers! She sent us some blue raspberry Jello and we had the Spring Jello molds which I purchased the last time we were on furlough. 

Timothy and Rebekah enjoying their jigglers.

To top off our day we colored eggs. This year we chose the marble coloring kit. Coloring eggs is done here at Easter time and often you will be given a colored egg as a gift from someone. There are even more coloring kits here to choose from now and we enjoy trying new ones each year.

Timothy rolling an egg in his hands to color it.

Ryan taking his turn at coloring. 

The boys had so much fun they even broke out into a silly song while coloring their eggs.

This was their big finish!

Easter eggs colored!

Whew! I truly believe we packed all the fun we could into this Easter Sunday! We all enjoyed ourselves and were so thankful we have a reason to celebrate. 

Christ is Risen! 

He is Risen indeed!

We pray you and your family had a blessed Easter!

Closing note: The next morning I found Timothy in Rebekah's room in this position after he had dressed for school. He was squatting on top of the toy box. By the way, he sits like this often when he is working a puzzle for example. When I asked what he was doing he replied, "I am matching my candies with the same color of eggs." He was color coordinating the color of his candy with the proper color of the plastic eggs.  Is he my child or what?

Needle in a Snow Drift

This story actually took place back in January of this year. However, it is one of several "inspirations" for me starting this blog. I think it is such a great story that I had to share with with you even if it may be "old news".

Back in January (as I already mentioned), the family all prepared for a trip to the city to purchase much needed warm weather clothes for our growing children.  We had quite a list of necessary items to find and that meant we had quite a few stops on our itinerary for the day. Now, driving in Russia is never boring and even at times can be exhausting as you are constantly looking out for the other person. Add strong winds, blowing snow, high humidity, black ice, and well below freezing temperatures to these already tense conditions and driving here becomes quite an adventure. A good example of the road conditions is pictured below. This is the first main highway as you are driving out of our village in Elita.

On this particular day of our planned shopping trip as we reached the halfway point to the city, we had a vehicle behind us that just wasn't patient enough to wait for us to pass a slow-moving truck.  As we tried to get out of the way of the hurried driver and then back into the passing lane we hit some ice and took a little slide right into a snowbank. We immediately thanked the Lord for His protection as our truck could have easily kept sliding into oncoming traffic. Instead we did a "nice" smooth spin and hit the snowbank on our side of the road facing the opposite direction. Our truck suffered no damage at all. After trying to a bit to get us out of the pit we were stuck in from the snow plows throwing a thick layer of snow along the edges of the road, a nice man stopped to help us. He pulled us out using our tow rope and we were back on the road to continue our drive to the city. Although our nerves were a bit rattled, we had a great day checking off items on our list and rejoicing in the fact that we made it home safe and sound.

The next day, David headed out to buy coal to heat our house. Along the way, an officer stopped him and asked him where the front license plate for our car was. To David's surprise, it was missing! He immediately called me and told me of how the officer let him know that we were missing the front tags on our car and we both thought...we were all over the place yesterday! Where could we have lost it? We had no idea when we lost it but we both were wondering if our little incident could have knocked it loose. Later that day, David and I went to a grocery store not too far from the spot where we went off the road earlier. We brought along a snow shovel hoping that we might be able to find our lost treasure. In Russia it is a very long process to get new tags in the first place or replace them if you lose them. No one wants to have to go through the process unless they absolutely have to! Therefore it is not an unusual thing to see lost tags on display in gas station windows or even men using sticks or their bare hands to "fish" through flooded streets where they just lost their license plates. 

As we tried to guess at the exact place where we went off the road, we quickly realized how many other people had the same experience. There were at least five or six areas similar to ours. Then I remembered that near our car, as we just turned our car around, I had seen a plastic bottle lying in the snow. The night of our incident the winds had been very strong and we feared that the snow drifts would have covered the bottle and our tracks making it almost impossible to find a lost, white license plate. Finally, after checking several spots along the road, we found our plastic bottle and recognized our tracks! As I sat in the truck praying, David began digging in a few spots also praying that we would find our tags. As he was almost ready to give up and figured we had lost it further down the road, he hit something metal with the shovel. It was our license plate! We couldn't believe we had actually been able to find it in such deep snow and were so excited about this answer to prayer!