Easter Friday & Saturday:
We got home from our whirlwind trip a few days before Easter and instead of preparing for Easter by buying stuff for the kids' Easter baskets, buying a ham and polish sausage, and making pastries for breakfast, I bought a Big Wheel on Amazon the day after returning home (after taking Logan to the Doctor first thing to make sure his leg was all healed up-which it was) and spent Easter Sunday morning assembling it so that I could race it down a crooked road that afternoon.
Although we did kick off Easter week with an Easter Egg Hunt at DreamWorks on Friday (which included Lunch with Daddy) 
and Madeline's 4th Birthday party on Saturday, which featured another Easter Egg Hunt 
and RJ taking on a "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude when the girls at the party were all playing dress up with the princess dresses. I know I'm killing his chances at a future run for POTUS here, but I just have to share pictures of him. Someday the video will make its way on screen as well. 
Easter Sunday:
For 11 years now, there has been an event in San Francisco on Easter Sunday (other than the Easter Parade including drag queens and rollerblading cows and the Hunky Jesus Contest) called the Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race (BYOBW). It started with a bunch of people on big wheels skidding down the famously crooked portion of Lombard Street. Since its inception, it has been moved to a similarly crooked portion of Vermont Street. Interestingly, while Vermont Street is not famous, it is actually the "crookedest street in San Francisco", not the famous Lombard street. Anyway, the event is basically a flash mob of people wearing funny costumes and driving children's toys down a very steep set of switchbacks. I've wanted to do it every year since we moved to California and I heard about it, but this year is really the first year that I could participate.
Lets recap our Easters out here:
Easter 2007 - Pregnant with RJ
Easter 2008 - Overloaded with classes/directing the CDC/conferencing/raising a 9-10 month old and I don't think we even acknowledged Easter
Easter 2009 - Attended BYOBW to see what it was all about, but didn't participate, mostly because I didn't get a big wheel soon enough
Easter 2010 - Celebrated Easter in South Carolina with Amy & Luke
Easter 2011 - Finally went down the hill in a big wheel!
I didn't have a lot of time to put together a really fabulous costume, but I unearthed an old superbuddy costume (which I'm still not quite sure how I acquired, since the costumes first made an appearance at Challenge camp and I didn't take one), which made me look like a pink power ranger and figured that was wacky enough for the event, particularly with knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, and a helmet.
You're probably thinking I was being overly cautious, but my knee would've been shredded had I not been wearing knee pads. The pads have the scratches to prove it!
Riding the big wheel was challenging because I didn't do any modifications. I'm pretty small, but I do not have the ass of a 5 year old - so that was a bit uncomfortable, which made it difficult to steer because I was too close to the steering wheel. But really, I shouldn't complain, I was riding a child's toy down some crazy switchbacks trying to avoid the masses of other people doing the same thing, and it was a crazy good time!
RJ also enjoyed watching his Mommy ride what is now his big wheel down a big hill.
Because we were all in San Francisco for the Big Wheel Race, we decided to wait a week to celebrate Easter. That also gave me more time to bake and buy Easter chocolate at a discount.
Easter Week Observed:
RJ and I dyed eggs, and then tried to make a tie dyed shirt out of the leftover dye. The damned stuff washed out except for a tiny bit of the red! Then Logan found the dye (he woke up from nap in the middle of the activity) on the kitchen table and dumped it all over the floor! Yep, that was fun to clean up.
Easter Sunday Observed:
The next Sunday, the kids looked for their Easter Baskets (I hid RJ's inside his carboard yellow submarine, and we put Logan's under the kids' table - of course after I took the picture of both baskets in the submarine)
and we ate our Swieconka (sh-vee-en-soon-kah), which is the traditional Polish Easter Breakfast.
The funny thing is that I never knew how to spell it as I had only heard it until I googled "Polish Easter Breakfast". However, it was sort of a half-assed bialy barszcz because the only Polish delis are in the Bay Area, and even though I had a week, I was not about to drive to the Bay JUST to get Fresh Polish Sausage. Grocery Stores only have smoked kielbasa, rather than fresh, which annoys me, but maybe next year I'll get a meat grinder and stuffer attachment for my kitchen aid and get the old family recipe to make my own. But that didn't help for this year and for some reason (perhaps because we had already postponed Easter) I decided that I still had to make the sausage soup, so I made ground pork meatballs that I seasoned to be similar to traditional polish sausage, and made the soup with that. It wasn't bad, but it was not quite the same. We also feasted on hardboiled decorated eggs, homemade babka (sweet raisin-y yeast bread with icing), homemade placek (coffee cake), and a sort of homemade almond apple pastry (I say "almost" because I took puff pastry and put almond paste and apples inside and drizzled it with icing. It seems like cheating when I use ready-made ingredients.)
That evening we had friends over for margaritas and ham with twice baked potatoes. I made a vegetable too, but I don't remember what it was (thank you margaritas!).
So it was a little bit of tradition and a little bit of unconventionality, but A LOT of fun.
More pictures from Easter week here.
We got home from our whirlwind trip a few days before Easter and instead of preparing for Easter by buying stuff for the kids' Easter baskets, buying a ham and polish sausage, and making pastries for breakfast, I bought a Big Wheel on Amazon the day after returning home (after taking Logan to the Doctor first thing to make sure his leg was all healed up-which it was) and spent Easter Sunday morning assembling it so that I could race it down a crooked road that afternoon.
Although we did kick off Easter week with an Easter Egg Hunt at DreamWorks on Friday (which included Lunch with Daddy) and Madeline's 4th Birthday party on Saturday, which featured another Easter Egg Hunt and RJ taking on a "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude when the girls at the party were all playing dress up with the princess dresses. I know I'm killing his chances at a future run for POTUS here, but I just have to share pictures of him. Someday the video will make its way on screen as well. Easter Sunday:For 11 years now, there has been an event in San Francisco on Easter Sunday (other than the Easter Parade including drag queens and rollerblading cows and the Hunky Jesus Contest) called the Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race (BYOBW). It started with a bunch of people on big wheels skidding down the famously crooked portion of Lombard Street. Since its inception, it has been moved to a similarly crooked portion of Vermont Street. Interestingly, while Vermont Street is not famous, it is actually the "crookedest street in San Francisco", not the famous Lombard street. Anyway, the event is basically a flash mob of people wearing funny costumes and driving children's toys down a very steep set of switchbacks. I've wanted to do it every year since we moved to California and I heard about it, but this year is really the first year that I could participate.
Lets recap our Easters out here:
Easter 2007 - Pregnant with RJ
Easter 2008 - Overloaded with classes/directing the CDC/conferencing/raising a 9-10 month old and I don't think we even acknowledged Easter
Easter 2009 - Attended BYOBW to see what it was all about, but didn't participate, mostly because I didn't get a big wheel soon enough
Easter 2010 - Celebrated Easter in South Carolina with Amy & Luke
Easter 2011 - Finally went down the hill in a big wheel!
I didn't have a lot of time to put together a really fabulous costume, but I unearthed an old superbuddy costume (which I'm still not quite sure how I acquired, since the costumes first made an appearance at Challenge camp and I didn't take one), which made me look like a pink power ranger and figured that was wacky enough for the event, particularly with knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, and a helmet.
You're probably thinking I was being overly cautious, but my knee would've been shredded had I not been wearing knee pads. The pads have the scratches to prove it! Riding the big wheel was challenging because I didn't do any modifications. I'm pretty small, but I do not have the ass of a 5 year old - so that was a bit uncomfortable, which made it difficult to steer because I was too close to the steering wheel. But really, I shouldn't complain, I was riding a child's toy down some crazy switchbacks trying to avoid the masses of other people doing the same thing, and it was a crazy good time!
RJ also enjoyed watching his Mommy ride what is now his big wheel down a big hill.
Because we were all in San Francisco for the Big Wheel Race, we decided to wait a week to celebrate Easter. That also gave me more time to bake and buy Easter chocolate at a discount.
Easter Week Observed:
RJ and I dyed eggs, and then tried to make a tie dyed shirt out of the leftover dye. The damned stuff washed out except for a tiny bit of the red! Then Logan found the dye (he woke up from nap in the middle of the activity) on the kitchen table and dumped it all over the floor! Yep, that was fun to clean up.
Easter Sunday Observed:
The next Sunday, the kids looked for their Easter Baskets (I hid RJ's inside his carboard yellow submarine, and we put Logan's under the kids' table - of course after I took the picture of both baskets in the submarine)
and we ate our Swieconka (sh-vee-en-soon-kah), which is the traditional Polish Easter Breakfast. The funny thing is that I never knew how to spell it as I had only heard it until I googled "Polish Easter Breakfast". However, it was sort of a half-assed bialy barszcz because the only Polish delis are in the Bay Area, and even though I had a week, I was not about to drive to the Bay JUST to get Fresh Polish Sausage. Grocery Stores only have smoked kielbasa, rather than fresh, which annoys me, but maybe next year I'll get a meat grinder and stuffer attachment for my kitchen aid and get the old family recipe to make my own. But that didn't help for this year and for some reason (perhaps because we had already postponed Easter) I decided that I still had to make the sausage soup, so I made ground pork meatballs that I seasoned to be similar to traditional polish sausage, and made the soup with that. It wasn't bad, but it was not quite the same. We also feasted on hardboiled decorated eggs, homemade babka (sweet raisin-y yeast bread with icing), homemade placek (coffee cake), and a sort of homemade almond apple pastry (I say "almost" because I took puff pastry and put almond paste and apples inside and drizzled it with icing. It seems like cheating when I use ready-made ingredients.)That evening we had friends over for margaritas and ham with twice baked potatoes. I made a vegetable too, but I don't remember what it was (thank you margaritas!).
So it was a little bit of tradition and a little bit of unconventionality, but A LOT of fun.
More pictures from Easter week here.
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