Secular Easter

Have I mentioned how amazing my friends are?  And how completely obessed I am with them?  When we moved here, I left behind my family, my house, my ability to walk everywhere I wanted to go and bunch of stuff that I was going to use again when we moved back to Provo, but Heavenly Father gave me the greatest group of friends possible.

Every so often my awesome friends and I have a huge and delicious dinner.  They remind me of family gatherings growing up--lots of kids running around doing who knows what, lots of food, and lots of laughing. 

Saturday Jared, one of the husbands, decided he wanted to go mountain biking on the trail behind our house.  I thought it was a good opportunity to have his family over to play while he and Greg rode.  Well then Ben wanted to ride the trail and so did Rachel.  One thing led to another and we ended up with six families eating delicious food at our house.  

Let me tell you a bit about this food:  Lexy decided we should grill. Then she decided she wanted to make hamburgers.  But not just any hamburgers--homemade hamburgers with homemade buns.  I made potato salad because these girls are intimidating cooks so I also go with the fail-proof.  Becky just bought ice cream because she, like me, refuses to cook for these girls.  Though Becky did say she was even nervous about the type and brand of ice cream she bought.  But the food was delicious.  So good and so much that all I do is clear the counter so it can all fit (which is barely did).  I don't even think about center pieces.  I just think about the delicious food. It also helps calm my crazy that we don't ever do these dinners for holidays and it's usually only a day or two in advance that they're planned so I don't have time or reason to be crazy with centerpieces and other matching tableware.

 Then since it was the day before Easter and we had a million kids at our house, we decided to do an egg hunt.  The kids got a little excited.

 We had to set some ground rules before releasing the kids: Henry and Piper first, Alice, Hazel and Lottie next, and last but not least the "big boys" Rex, Jack and Derick.  The other Wheatley boys were too cool to hunt for eggs and Elle got some sort of bribe from her mom not to hunt.

 Once Henry realized there was candy in the eggs, he got really into it--he was going to get as many eggs as possible and then make himself sick with the candy.

 Alice was so excited she just kind of ran around in circles.

 His technique was to put the basket on the ground then gather as many eggs in a reasonable vicinity as possible before moving the basket.

And then the kids ate all their candy while the adults laughed at everything.  Then the girls did the dishes faster than I could get my broom out and they were gone and the house looked like they hadn't even been there.  I have the best friends and we had a lovely secular Easter, minus the rain, which did kind of kill the backyard cook-out I had planned.