Happy Easter

We had a really nice Easter, although we so missed being with Martin's family. We'll get to see them soon for Mat and Mary Claire's wedding, so we are looking forward to that (our first long road trip with the kids - wish us luck!!!). This Easter was the start of my reign as the Stewart/Brown family hostess for holiday celebrations. I learned a lot, including:

• it's not as hard to make a good pie crust from scratch as you would think
• it's much harder to get a cake to come cleanly out of a mold shaped like a lamb
• when making whip topping from heavy whipping cream, mixing it faster and longer doesn't make it lighter and creamier; it makes it butter
• shoving all the potato peels into the disposal at once = a late night shopping trip for Drano
• HEB is closed on Easter Sunday (which I think is great); Wal-Mart isn't 
• in spite of what Mom said, it is possible to make chocolate pie filling too thick

Even though we made four pie fillings and three cakes in order to serve a cake and two pies, I would say the meal was a success. We had: smoked turkey, black forest ham, broccoli, rice, cheese casserole, zucchini tomato casserole, corn casserole, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, fruit salad, home-made rolls, chocolate cream pie, banana cream pie, and lamb cake. I think I gained at least three pounds...  :(

The Easter bunny brought baskets with little surprises for the kids. You can see below Kiley's reaction to getting her own pink brush (from the dollar store :). The big kids helped hide eggs, and then hunted them with Kiley and two of our good friends who came over and played for awhile while we cooked. Also, below is a picture of my beautiful girls taken at Sydney's recent poetry performance, and one of Jake and Kiley hunting eggs.