Celebrating Easter

A few days before Easter we had an Easter egg hunt with some friends in our ward at the park near our house. As you can see from what we're wearing the weather was not quite as warm as we are used to :)

 The whole kid crew (plus 1 mom).

 Walking back to our house after the hunt to get warm and eat some food.

 We were all pregnant at the same time and had been wanting to take a picture of the babies now that they were all here. Oliver is 2 weeks old, Lily 2 months, and Joseph, 6 months. Barrett caught this great moment as we were getting ready.

One of the small, not so important things we take for granted in America is those little color tablets to dye your easter eggs. Not surprisingly, they don't sell those in Norway, so we had to get creative to make our own dye. Here I am draining the blueberries I boiled to get blue dye.

 Plus left over pink food coloring from Lily's birthday and we splurged (ha ha, yes it was expensive) to buy two more colors.

 Here's Barrett, always working up a new invention to make a masterpiece.

 As you can see, we had some blue, two shades of pink, and green if you left it in the dye for a reaaalllly long time. We got a little impatient with the length of time it took for the eggs to change color, as you can tell by all the white on our eggs, ha ha.

So we added some stickers.

Easter egg hunt on Easter morning.

 One Norwegian tradition that I love is giving these darling Easter eggs rather than baskets. I plan to take this tradition back to America with us.

Oliver's egg is almost as big as he is.

 Lily playing with her new bubble gun. We had a sticky mess in our living room by the time she was done playing :)

 Our beautiful children in their Easter outfits.

Pictures of our little man

We've taken a lot of pictures of our "little man" so I thought I would share some of my favorites from the beginning.

This hand position hasn't left from day one. He still often rests his hands or falls asleep with hands like this :)

 His cheek chub is the best!

One of the first smiles.

I love a good sad face too.

Boys are so fun to dress up for church! But it makes him look so much older when he's all dressed up.

I don't think I realized how sweet it was going to be to watch Lily interact with Oliver. Maybe it's just because I was the youngest so I don't have memories of a new baby entering the family, but I am so excited to watch them develop a relationship. I can't wait until they can run around together.

It's also really funny to see how Lily includes Oliver in her play. There was definitely an adjustment to the attention spent on Oliver, but she was an immediate good helper and now is always concerned if he is sad and shares her toys with him.

And last of all are some newborn pictures. Well, kind of newborn pictures. I was asked to be in a training video for a baby monitor at Barrett's work at Laerdal (I should post these pictures too) and they offered to take some newborn/family pictures in exchange for helping. We had to wait a little longer than I expected and the photographer is trained in pictures of products not in portraiture and we had a bright white background, ha ha. Oliver never fell asleep and we didn't know how to position him without being directed so it didn't really turn out for newborn pictures. But despite all this we still got some good family ones and some great ones of Lily. It reminded me how beautiful our Lily is. Her deep brown eyes and long, thick, dark eyelashes are gorgeous.

 Hahaha! I love this awkward photo. I think we're arguing... :)

 I love our cute family!