Christ is Risen Indeed!

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling down death by death!
And upon those in the tomb
bestowing life!

We had a fantastic Pascha celebration this weekend which culminated in a trip to Five Guys for hamburgers and french fries in a flesh-meat and cheese eating frenzy. (The Eastern Orthodox fast from meat, eggs, dairy, olive oil and wine for all of Great Lent.) For the spiritual side of our celebration (which dominated our week and was beautiful on so many levels) visit my other blog for a feast of the sights of Holy Week in an Eastern Orthodox church. We arrived home from our Pascha service and church family celebration around 5:00 am and told the kids not to bother us until noon. The on to the fun, the kids searched for their Pascha baskets. I set up a picture scavenger hunt for them which took them more than an hour to get through all 34 clues and finally get to their baskets in the attic. Here's the rules:

1. Clues are photographs of places. You must go to each place pictured to find the next clue.
2. The clue will always be another picture and will be somewhere in, on or immediately around what is pictured.
3. Everyone must stick together - no stragglers allowed.
4. All must cooperate and get a turn to help.

Here's some photo fun of the clues and the places they traveled to find them:

This was one of the first clues - their as yet unplanted garden:

I made it harder by actually burying the clue and then digging up about half of the dirt so they couldn't tell what was newly dug....hehehe....that took them awhile!


This clue led them to....
JM's pants pocket. I hid the clue there well before the hunt began and he was so good to keep it a secret until it was time. Even when they were looking in his pockets, he just stood there and didn't tell them which pocket had the clue.

This was funny because JT is afraid of the chickens so I told him where to find the clue while all the others were scrambling around in the chicken house, JT was safely climbing the roof. Miriam found three eggs, though, even though she didn't find the clue!
Another inspired hiding job....
I actually put the clue under the cedar chips, under the house under Pumpkin's little derriere. When they pulled it out of the cage it had suffered some chewing damage...teehee:

I had Matt, one of the neighborhood kids, climb the tree for me and hide this one - that set them back since they knew there was no way this pregnant mom had climbed that tree!
Tali wasn't all that interested in the hunt so we took some time to make a crawling video of her whilst the rest of the gang searched on. This is her Big New Skill from the past week!


The final clue - all our upstairs doorways look the same so they had to try several doors before they found their baskets hidden in the attic:

And enjoying the hard-won booty - L'il Wekinz for all. For most of them, they got their first Webkinz to play around with - they were all thrilled (but Nathan was all about the candy).
Tad picked out the koala for Phlip - they do look remarkably similar - same broad, flat nose, round cheeks, big ears and beady little eyes. Put some glasses on that cutie and they could be twins!