Easter 2025 Celebrations

The youth went to a dress rehearsal of the Easter Pageant Tuesday night. We got pretty good seats. However, someone had been there hours before, saving them for us. Being a dress rehearsal, we were warned that the cast may have to stop and restart at certain points. Thankfully, they stopped and restarted only once 5 minutes into the show. We were lucky to get good seats; it was quite a large audience for it being a dress rehearsal. I think it's better to just go on a normal day. The most off-putting thing about going to a dress rehearsal is that there is no set start time. We waited a half hour in our seats before the show started. The show itself was great as usual. Since I am more familiar with the Lamb of God production, it was fun to hear clips from that in this production--makes sense because the same guy, Rob Gardner, composed the music for the Easter pageant.

 

 April 8th

The Easter pageant at the Mesa temple had lots of people on stage and cool effects--a great way to kick off our Easter celebrations! 

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On Saturday April 19th, we had our ward Easter breakfast and egg hunt. I meant to make deviled eggs to bring, but Erik made them instead since I was running late. He missed most of the activity because he spent so long making them. I walked over to the park with Ian, chatted with random ward members, and watched a few tug-of-war games. I brought around 50 filled eggs to share for the egg hunt. Like last year, Ian didn't grab many eggs as he could have. Luckily, a friend gave us some of her kid's eggs, so Ian ended up coming home with plenty. There was breakfast items set out, but none of them were any good. Not even the cinnamon rolls. When Erik finally showed with the deviled eggs, they were a big hit and didn't last long.

Tug-of-war games

Ian had lots of eggs after the party!

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Later that evening on April 19th, Erik had his Lamb of God performance. Erik went to an hour or two worth of practice almost every Sunday afternoon since January. Initially, even before anyone was offered or even auditioned for any part, I was asked to play the piano for this entire production. I suggested that they rope in some other pianists to help play too, since this is a large-scale work and over 100 pages of music to learn is too much for any unpaid pianist to learn in a short time. I'm neither a good enough pianist nor am a nice enough person to be putting in that much work for free. I went for one planning meeting, and we (we as in the director, the stake music chairman, and another pianist besides myself) agreed to divide the acts into 3 sections; I took the first section of movements 1-5. Even that was too much work. It really stressed me out. Thankfully, the director of this production decided it would be cooler to use a full orchestra--and yes, he was right--it was way cooler to have an orchestra play instead of just piano but a lot more work, for him at least. But way less for me! That said, I did have to go twice to help the choir learn their part. I have discovered that I do not like playing for large choirs. Soloists sure, but choirs--nope. Erik auditioned and got the part for an accuser, which he wasn't super happy about because he was hoping to land the role for Judas. A lot of work went into this production, and it wasn't perfect (a few out of tune instruments, yikes), but all in all it was a good performance. I took all of the kids. There were lots of people there, but still not as many as they had planned for. Erik did a great job as the accuser! His singing has definitely improved since last year.

https://youtube.com/shorts/aPAoYcaeRrQ?feature=share

The first video is too long to post here, so I uploaded in to YouTube.

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And now, for the actual Easter day. Erik helped the kids dye the eggs. This year's dye kit was tie dye. Some of the eggs turned out pretty neat with the kit. The Easter bunny had set the kid's Easter baskets out the night before on the kitchen table. They were all into their baskets when I came downstairs in the morning. The Easter bunny thankfully didn't go too overboard with the candy this year, but it was still plenty of sugar! 

Dying hard-boiled eggs with dad

The Easter bunny came!

Ian was (and always is) the first child up. He was well into his Easter basket before anyone else came down the stairs!

Church on Easter Sunday was only an hour, but it was stressful for me. I had to play organ, play piano for a piano/organ duet, play piano for primary, and then play organ in a piano/organ duet for the last hymn. Everything went fine until the primary's performance. I started at the cue, but the primary chorister cut us off a few measures into the song (Beautiful Savior) because the primary started singing the wrong verse! I know it wasn't my fault in any way, but I still felt icky about it. Never in my entire career of primary pianist have we ever started a performance over. Oh well. The last hymn (He is Risen) was the worst. This was a do-over since the last verse got cut by the bishop. Ugh, he was probably right to do so. I played the hymn okay. And I mean just okay. Not great, but not bad enough for anyone to notice any mess-ups. At least I was playing ok until the interlude leading up to the key change. First of all, some dude (probably someone from the bishopric since they sounded very close to me) started singing the last verse right smack in the middle, and then the chorister (despite several practices with her) lead in the entire congregation before the interlude had finished. It sounded like a train wreck for a while. I was just trying to find out where everyone was! Thankfully, I found where everyone was and we all got back on track, and it ended okay. But, what an awful experience. My face was all red afterwards, and I even cut my postlude short because I just wanted to leave. Remind me next time to never do anything like that again! The rest of the Easter day went just fine, thankfully. We were invited over to a friend's house for Easter dinner. I had bought lamb and stuff for funeral potatoes, but I figured we would have it another time. I made deviled eggs, a warm brussel sprout salad, and strawberry lemonade to share. A couple of other families were invited as well. The food was overall just meh, but we had a good time chatting and playing games. 

One game was an egg-rolling game. Hard-boiled eggs were crashed into each other; the cracked one was out and the non-cracked egg when on to the next round.

We played a round of...well I don't know what its called, but similar to scattergories. 

The kids liked playing with these stacking toys. 

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April 27. Since we went over to someone else's house for Easter, we didn't get to do our usual backyard egg hunt. I didn't think the kids would care that much, but they insisted on one. I kept asking them if they thought that maybe they were too old for an egg hunt, but they all said no they weren't! So, the next Sunday, as soon as Grandma and Grandpa left, I stuffed the eggs and Erik scattered/hid them around the backyard. They had a good time collecting them. I think Elisa got the most. There was a prize egg for each of them. Elisa's egg was shiny hair foil extensions/clips, Gabe's was a huge plastic orange egg with a peep plushie in it, and Ian--a green egg stuffed with something that I can't recall at the moment!

All lined up, ready to start

Elisa got the most eggs!

Opening their eggs on the grass

Cute girl with all her eggs. Well, not all. I had stuffed 3 eggs all with giant gummy crabby patty candy (one for each kid), and hers got somehow left behind. Erik found it a month later, all melted and gross. I guess he hid it too well!