An Open-Handed Easter

Baby Girl,
We had another head-spinning weekend trip to Abilene, but I know everyone loved getting to see you. Mommy and Daddy? We were mostly just the chauffeurs. We left Friday afternoon and were tired and grumpy when we arrived. You did great in the car, other than the massively poopy diaper in Mason to christen your first ride in Daddy's new car seat. So bad, I had to carry you out of the gas station bathroom in just your clean diaper, with your clothes wrapped up in a bag. (By the way, I went to a million places this weekend that don't have a diaper changing station. Infuriating to carry a kid in and have to figure out how to change her on top of the wet sink counter...)

Anyway, Saturday we met your Savta and Sabba and Uncle Jordan for an early lunch, then headed to see your Great Grandma Stella at her new assisted living home. She has so many pictures of you all over her room! She was excited to see you and hold you. Your Great Aunt Margie was also there filling us in on the exciting new hobby of walking and hunting for spare change. Hilarious!

Then that evening, we headed up to see your Gigi's family. Your Great Grandpa "Stumpy" was having a birthday celebration, so we got to see your Uncles Tanner and Chance and all the family! You had a great time with your Great Aunt Sara
who talks in a silly voice and danced around with you. We even got to meet her husband Derric for the first time. You had a rough time taking a nap amidst all the excitement but still were a sweet girl for everyone.

Then Sunday morning we went to church with Grammy and you were wonderful for the nursery. They were very sweet to try and feed you even though you weren't super hungry and came home and took a long nap. Had to rest up before all the afternoon's festivities! We had a big lunch with all our family (even my cousin Ben came down from Oklahoma!) and the weather was nice for our humongously-over-the-top-ridiculous egg hunt. I think we had about 500 eggs for just Jordan, Ryan, Miriam and Emerson (though she mostly just carried around her basket smiling and waving).

Did I mention that we left our fabulous camera at home? Grammy let us borrow hers temporarily, and of course Rachael and Amy took a zillion pictures anyway. Hopefully we will be getting a CD of pics soon that we can post. So much family in such a short time!

And since the whole point of the weekend was to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, I have to share this amazing post from Beth Moore and a cool story from my mom's church. At the end of the service, the pastor was talking about God's generosity and "open-handedness." So they gave every family an envelope with money in it - between 5 and 100 dollars. (Ours had $10.) We are supposed to pray as a family and decide on how we can bless someone else with it. After talking with Bo, we decided that we want to go out to a restaurant and without telling them, we want to pay the bill for some other couple. Maybe we will send them a little note with a blessing on it. I think we would just have a fun time watching their faces when the waiter tells them that they are taken care of! A nice picture of the free gift of forgiveness that Christ's death and resurrection offers us.

I really liked the Max Lucado quote I heard this weekend. Sorry for paraphrasing, but I think the point of it was this - When talking about God's love and redemption of mankind, the only thing more illogical than why he would still forgive us, is why we would choose not to accept his forgiveness.