I promised the details of our last adventure in Georgia. On Saturday morning everyone was slow to wake up because we had been up late the night before watching the stars. But we had plans and, once plans have been made, we rarely change them.

We started the morning at Cracker Barrel because Meg thought having the whole family eat at Cracker Barrel was just the best thing in the world. My parents lives about a mile from a Cracker Barrel, so this probably wasn't a huge treat for them, but Cracker Barrel is a special outing for us because it is quite a long drive to our nearest Cracker Barrel. We do love it so--the food, the rocking chairs and the checkers. That morning Meg very much enjoyed the blueberry pancakes, though I am not sure her capris will ever recover from sitting on blueberries.

From Cracker Barrel, we headed to New Echota. New Echota was the Cherokee capital prior to the removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma and it was the beginning point for the Trail of Tears. It holds such things as the  first Indian language newspaper office as well as a typical Cherokee farm.

The log buildings were quite instructive to the girls. We've been reading about Pa building the log cabin in Little House on the Prairie. Meg and Clare were able to see how each log was cut so that another log would fit into it. As Meg said, "It's just like Lincoln Logs."

Meg decided the Supreme Courthouse was a great place for a song and dance. Considering this is where the court case that challenged the treaty giving up all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi began, I'm not sure a song and dance was appropriate, but that never stops Meg.

The key purpose of our trip to New Echota was to let the girls walk and walk prior to climbing into the car for several hours. Following our New Echota adventure, we packed up the car and were on our way home.  After an overnight stop, we arrived home Sunday evening just in time to go back to school and begin dance class on Monday.

We have returned home from our Easter break trip. It was a long drive back, but what fun we had during our last bit of time in Georgia.

Friday was quite a day. The girls and I went to the Tellus Science Museum for the first time. We had heard only wonderful things about this museum, but we were still surprised by how much we enjoyed this outing.

A particular treat for us was the planetarium. I've been wanting to take Meg and Clare to a planetarium for several months because Meg has developed an interest in space. But I knew it was risky to take Baby Anne. A completely dark room with a booming voice and strange projections on the ceiling was a recipe for uncontrollable crying. But the admissions attendant at Tellus informed me that the program was for younger children, so some noise was expected. Also, there was a good chance we'd be the only ones in the planetarium--and it turned out we were. We were able to enjoy a fantastic presentation without worry that Baby Anne could cry at any moment and disturb others. Meg and Clare loved the presentation and were all set to watch real stars in the sky Friday night (but more about that later).

In addition to the planetarium, Meg and Clare enjoyed the hands-on science room as well as an area in which you can dig for fossils and pan for gem stones. Kids are even allowed to take home a fossil and gem.

Oh, did I mention Meg and Clare spent the day dressed as ladybugs. Hence the wings in the pictures.

After we finished at the museum, Meg and Clare attempted some kite flying.

After dinner, my sister and her husband pulled out their fire pit and our evening fun began. Meg and Clare made s'mores, which Meg referred to as a candy sandwich. The girls also picked flowers that my sister turned into fairy crowns.

With everyone having so much fun, I decided to forego bedtime and let the girls watch the stars come out. We all watched as star after star popped out in the sky. Soon my brother-in-law was able to point out the Big Dipper. I was so excited to be able to see it myself.

At some point in the evening, my sister made a tent for Meg and Clare and they practiced camping out. By the light of an electric lantern, my sister read them Jane Yolen's Owl Moon. What a perfect night.

We had yet another adventure before leaving Saturday, but that story must wait another day.

Thursday of Easter break began with a trip to my mom's school. She's taught at the school for 24 years and will retire in 20 days (she's counting down), so we wanted to make sure we saw her in her classroom one last time.

To our great pleasure, the older kids at the school were practicing their maypole dance for May Day next week. Meg and Clare loved listening to the Celtic music and watching the kids circling the ribbons around the maypole.

After our school visit, we headed to the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia. This museum offers a spectacular selection of paintings and sculptures with a Western theme. There are even stagecoaches sitting in the galleries. The timing of the visit was great because we just began reading Little House on the Prarie and the pictures could give the girls some reference to picture scenes described in the book. However, Meg and Clare were not there for the paintings. They were there for Sagebrush Ranch--the hands-on room.

They wanted to ride on the life-sized model of a horse.

And ride the horse with Baby Anne.

They wanted to take fun pictures and pretend to be a Native American woman.

And do a little weaving.

And, of course,they wanted to dress up.

Also, Nana and Baby Anne needed to ride the stagecoach.

Following our trip to the museum, we rushed back to the house to make a red velvet cake that we would turn into a ladybug cake. It is becoming a tradition that Clare has a birthday cake with family during Easter break (though her birthday is still a month away). Her new favorite book is Ladybug Girl, so we went with that as a theme. Meg and Clare had fun decorating the cake by icing the cake with red frosting and adding round chocolate cookies for the ladybug spots.

Soon the girls were dressed as ladybugs. But they were moving at such high rates of speed, all the pictures came out blurred. I suppose that is a good sign that fun was being had by all. It was a good day.

Since the girls are on Easter break from school, we are trying to make our trip to Georgia both fun and relaxing. Also since it took us two days to drive here and will take us two days to drive back, I am trying to limit our outings to things close by.

Yesterday, after putting together Meg's bike which we just purchased and had shipped here, we headed to a story time led by a friend of our family's whom I've known all my life. The theme of the story time was butterflies and in addition to reading butterfly books and singing butterfly songs, the kids made butterflies from ziplock bags, Easter grass and pipe cleaners. After story time was over, our friend sat down with Meg and Clare and read Jane Yolen's An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball. What a lovely treat that book was with its lyrical rhyme and repetition.

Following story time we enjoyed a lunchtime tea party. As you can see from the picture above, the girls were a bit rambunctious and played dress up with their napkins. But things calmed down as we discussed how the building we were in was built the very same year as The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published. We, of course, chose chamomile tea to drink (because that is what Mrs. Rabbit gives Peter). We also recommended to our hosts that they do some Peter Rabbit events.

We spent the afternoon relaxing and enjoying some quiet outdoor play. All in all an enjoyable Easter break day.

(Due to travel, I was delayed in posting this. With any luck, I'll do another post this evening to catch up a bit.)

I am writing from a hotel room. It is just after 6 a.m. and all my children are still sleeping. Early riser Clare opened her eyes for about 30 seconds, mumbled nonsense and went back to sleep. Baby Anne slept soundly through the night and is still sleeping. We are on our way to visit family, but I don't think it is the trip exhausting them. I suspect the are still recovering from Easter Sunday.

Easter has become a favorite day for our family. While remaining special, unlike many family traditions, our Easter changes from year-to-year. A few years ago, after attending Mass ourselves, we joined our Antiochian Orthodox neighbors for an Easter dinner of splendid Middle Eastern food. We then headed to their church for Vespers followed by a visit from the Easter Bunny and an Easter egg hunt. We headed from there to a dinner with my husband's work colleagues.

Last year we hosted a brunch ourselves. While our brunch was great fun, Meg and Clare mostly remember running around Nicole's empty apartment (she and her husband had just finished moving to their new home) and learning to play dreidel from Nicole's husband (I am certain Easter dreidel playing will catch on).

This year was the year of the egg hunts.

After quickly checking out their Easter baskets Sunday morning, Meg and Clare headed to the front yard for an egg hunt with their neighbor friends. (See picture above and note the kids were still in pajamas). While Clare found the most eggs of any of the children, she was quite disappointed that it was Meg who found the large golden egg.

Following the egg hunt, we ate a nice breakfast (ham, eggs,and Rhode Island egg biscuits). We then quickly dressed and headed to Mass. What a beautiful Mass! We then headed to a friend's house for Easter brunch. The kids hunted eggs, played with dogs and ate a ridiculous amount of food. The other children at the brunch were new to Meg and Clare but they all became fast friends and there were many tears when we had to leave.

From the brunch we went to an egg hunt and happy hour hosted by a family from Meg and Clare's school. The girls were already so tired from playing hard all day long, but they quickly recovered and ran up and down the steep hill of the backyard.

Everyone was quick to go to sleep that night. What a wonderful day of seeing old friends and meeting new friends.

With Spring having emerged, Meg keeps saying, "I wish it was always Spring." I reply, "If it were always Spring, you wouldn't appreciate it as much." That for me also summarizes why we need Lent. If we only celebrate Easter, then we don't appreciate it nearly as much.

I had a sense of this years before being exposed to the Catholic practices of Lent and Easter. While an English major studying modernist writers, I encountered T.S. Eliot. Our amazing professor decided to lead us in an in depth study of Eliot's The Waste Land. We studied this single poem for several weeks. We went line-by-line and traced back his many literary allusions to attempt to find the meaning of this poem. The entire class was mesmerized, but I became particularly obsessed by the beauty Eliot presented.

When Eliot's poetry is first presented in high school, it is so easy to see only the ugliness of life he presents. And certainly there is much of that in The Waste Land. He, after all, is presenting a dry, lifeless waste land. It begins with the voices of the dead saying they prefer winter ("Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow). It mocks the frailty of those thought to be in touch with the divine ("Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,/Had a bad cold, nevertheless/Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe.") It describes the crowds of London as if they are in Dante's circles of Hell. This is not happy stuff. But after depicting a dry, desolate waste land full of death, false voices and loveless sex, there is hope at the end. Perhaps there is only rock and no water. Or perhaps there is water--the promise of life. Perhaps there is a spring of water. "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" Christ has returned and now "the grass is singing/over the tumbled graves."

The joy shown in the last section of The Waste Land can only be felt by seeing the ugliness of all that precedes it. That helps me to understand the importance of Lent. Having a period of solemnness in which we reflect upon our sinfulness allows us to rejoice all the more in the power of Christ's victory over death.

The first time I went to Easter Vigil (the Mass held on Saturday night that ushers in Easter) I went to the Dominican House of Studies near the Catholic University of America in D.C. One could not find a more beautiful and appropriate setting than this medieval-esque chapel to experience Easter Vigil. Following a bonfire at which the Easter Candle is lit, Easter Vigil begins in darkness. In that darkness, there are numerous readings from the Old Testament that explain the Covenant with Israel and foretell the coming salvation. Then the Gloria is sung. The lights come on and you are surrounded by Easter lilies and the beauty of Easter. This is even more pronounced at the Dominican House of Studies, where the friars removed their black cloaks worn during winter to reveal the white Dominican garb. Easter has arrived and there is life where there was once death.

I've made it a tradition to read The Waste Land on Holy Saturday since college. We have a busy day planned, but I do hope to have a quiet period of time in which to read it today. We've been distracted this Lent. My husband's work has kept him particularly busy. We've dealt with a broken finger and surgery. We have a new baby. Life has been busy and we haven't focused on Lent as we should. I fear that will impact our Easter. But there is hope. Meg woke up this morning and said, "Tomorrow is Easter. I am so excited. There will be pretty music. The purple cloth will come off the statues and we can say Alleluia as much as we want."

From the moment we were expecting our first child, I knew one day we would have a trundle bed. I love trundle beds. I have always loved trundle beds. This great love affair must have started when my mother would read us the Little House books. I could picture Mary and Laura snuggled up in their trundle bed while the winter weather beat against the little cabin in the woods of Wisconsin. With that cozy picture nestled happily in my brain, I was quite susceptible to the Pottery Barn Kids catalogue pictures of a little white wooden bed with a matching trundle bed peeking out from beneath it.

When our first two children turned out to both be girls, I envisioned them sharing a room with a twin bed and a trundle bed. However, when it came time to replace their toddler beds with "real" beds, those two girls had their hearts set on bunk beds. That didn't stop me. I bought bunk beds with a trundle bed. After all, baby number three was on the way and it turned out she was going to be a girl too. Why not three girls in one room. And even if we decided against that, wouldn't we need an extra bed for sleepovers and the occasional visit from Grandma. I also thought that while the top bunk would be Meg's, she might opt to sleep on the trundle bed for awhile. That turned out not to be the case. The top bunk of our bunk beds is so enclosed she has always been completely safe there (the two-year-old brother of one of her friends refers to it as Meg's cribby because it looks more like a crib than a bed). It also helps that Meg is a sound sleeper and never wakes up at night (in other words, no middle of the night ladder climbing).

For months, the trundle bed went unused. Right up until Meg broke her finger. Once the doctor determined she needed a full cast over her hand and top part of her arm, ladder climbing any time of day became just about impossible. Oh, how grateful we've been for that trundle bed over the last few weeks. Each night I pull it out. Each morning I push it back under the bed. And in between Meg has a safe, cozy place on which to sleep. An added benefit is that the girls must keep their floor free of toys and dress up clothes so that I can pull the bed out.

Last night as we were reading from a Little House book, Meg became so excited by the mention of a trundle bed. "Hey," she said, "They have a trundle bed just like me." I don't know how much use the trundle bed will get after Meg gets her cast off in a few weeks. Meg and Clare do have plans for Baby Anne to move into their room when she is bigger so they can have a "sleeping room" and they can turn her room into the "play room." Perhaps we'll do that for awhile. But then a few years later, I suspect one of them will make the play room into their own bedroom. Then the other two will separate the bunk beds into two twin beds and move them to opposite sides of the big "sleeping room." Then everyone will have as much personal space as they can get. But with any luck, there will be nights when they all pile into one room again for late night talks and that trundle bed will be pulled out once again so they can all be together.

I love trundle beds. And I do so hope this trundle bed will be a happy memory in my daughters' childhood.

Pretzel-making day finally arrived. To be clear pretzel-making is appropriate any day of Lent. We chose today because rain was in the forecast, so we knew we wouldn't be spending the afternoon outside.

What do pretzels have to do with Lent? Simply put, the dough is free of anything that would break the Lenten fast (even under the stricter old rules) and the shape of the pretzel symbolizes crossed arms in prayer.

I made pretzels a couple of years ago, but had completely forgotten about the tradition until Meg came home with this reminder from school.

Surprisingly I found a boxed pretzel-making kit at the grocery store. Pretzels are not hard to do from scratch, but having the kit gave me security that I had all the ingredients before we began. (Yes, I've been on the Internet a few times researching substitutes after realizing I was out of something that I was absolutely sure I had.)

Using our boxed supplies, we mixed our dough.

After giving our dough about thirty minutes to rise, we separated the dough into small balls. These balls are then rolled into a dough snake and then you make the pretzel shape. Easier said than done. This process proved incredibly difficult for three-year-old Clare who broke down in tears because the dough just stuck to her hands. Our still one-handed Meg also had great difficulties (though she got creative and somehow just shaped her ball into something resembling a pretzel shape). For Clare, I finally had to just give her dough already shaped into a snake and she did great from there.

After we shaped our pretzels, they had to be dipped in boiling water with baking soda. I sent the kids far, far away for this part. The pretzels were then placed in the oven and baked. The result looked pretty good.

The girls ate the pretzels they had shaped with dinner tonight. This is definitely a great family tradition for Lent, but I am hoping it gets easier as the girls get older.

Butler's Orchard has been a favorite adventure destination for us for nearly two years now. We first went with Nicole as part of a day of adventure to celebrate her wedding (sort of a bachelorette party if the attendees were toddlers). That day we picked strawberries. Clare, who had just turned two and had already developed her obsession with all things Peter Rabbit, spotted a man whom she was convinced was Mr. McGregor. She was shaking with fear that he would put her in a pie. In an attempt to calm her fears, we talked to the man and his wife. It did little to calm Clare, but the man's wife was highly amused by the whole thing.

Since that time, we've picked blueberries, raspberries and apples at Butler's. We've also made their Bunnyland an annual tradition. We love Bunnyland. Sure, we would prefer that Bunnyland take place in the days following Easter. Right now we are observing Lent and it would be best if we were doing Lenten activities such as making pretzels (which we will do in the next few days). But Bunnyland and most Easter events take place before Easter these days, so we have to give a little bit. (One huge exception in our area is the White House Easter Egg Roll, which still takes place on the Monday after Easter as it has for many, many years.)

Back to Bunnyland. Yesterday Meg and Clare decided they would begin their Bunnyland day by hunting Easter eggs. There isn't really any hunting involved since the plastic eggs are just spread out on the ground. The kids fill little orchard baskets with eggs and then dump them into cleverly designed boxes that make returning eggs fun. Kids are promised a treat basket at then end of their visit to Bunnyland so there are no tears involved in returning the eggs. 

Periodically throughout the day, we saw the adorably dressed orchard bunny pictured below. At this point in the day she was handing out kettle corn. She did her job well. We went home with a bag of kettle corn because it was just so yummy. I must say I admired this woman's ability to keep a cheerful face throughout the day. It was quite warm yesterday and her costume was not meant for a hot day.

Always a favorite at Butler's Orchard is the rubber ducky race. As you can see below, kids pump out water and the little ducks move. Poor Meg was working with only one arm since her right arm is still in a cast. Clare still struggled with enough height and strength to pump any water at all. Still, they both loved it. 

Located throughout the festival are fun wooden cutouts and bunny scarecrows for great picture-taking opportunities. Meg loved the tractor below. This year she was just the right height to get the perfect picture.

Pony rides are another favorite at Bunnyland each year. As you can see below, bunny ears are added to the ponies (how cute is that!). The pony ride workers were extra helpful to me this year. Under normal circumstances, I would walk alongside Clare because she is small. This year I should also have walked alongside Meg because she is injured. But I had Baby Anne with us so I couldn't walk alongside either girl. The workers happily helped out and walked alongside each of the girls. 

Following pony rides, we played in the play area for awhile which consists of fantastic wooden play structures. I don't have any pictures because I was spending all my time trying to keep track of my children. We also went on a hay ride. I tried taking pictures of that, but none of them turned out very well. It is a fun hay ride. For one thing, there actually is hay in the wagon (surprisingly, we've been on several "hay" rides in the area that did not include hay). Also, the hay ride path is decorated with wooden cutouts of bunnies, bunny houses, eggs, and many other things. After the hay ride, the girls spent some time riding toy tractors and we ate lunch. Since we were eating at an orchard, we had fantastic apples, I topped my hot dog with relish canned at the orchard, and the girls ate apple cider donuts. I am disappointed I could not try any of the pies from the orchard bakery due to my current food restrictions (Baby Anne has a sensitive tummy, so while I'm nursing I have a long list of restrictions). Following lunch, Meg and Clare jumped in a bouncy castle (probably not best to do that right after lunch, but there were no bad results) and then planted flowers and decorated their flower pots with farm stickers.

As you can tell from the squint on Clare's face above, the sun was bright and by this point in the day the girls were getting quite tired. They were ready to go home and I told them we would go home right after we visited the petting barn and hayloft. The moment they saw that hayloft, all their energy returned. My children love playing in hay. They organized all the other children into "hay fight" groups and took turns burying each other (we parents--who are such killjoys--kept reminding the kids not to bury each other completely for fear another child would accidentally jump on the buried child).

The kids would occasionally take time out to pet a chick, duck or bunny. There were also lambs to ooh and aah over,

Even Baby Anne had a great time in the hayloft.

It was a great day. Butler's Orchard came through for us yet again.