Frisky Business

My family is a little strange.

We wholeheartedly agree with Michelle here:

"April 24. Easter. He is risen! Easter is one of the most important holidays, so this might be the most important picture of the album. Christians believe that God came to earth to rescue humans from sin and death. This coming to earth took place in the person of Jesus Christ, who lived 2000 years ago. He lived a sinless life, and was killed and buried underground. However, on the third day after his burial, he rose up from the dead, alive but different. He was more powerful than death, and through him only we are able to live eternally. This is the message of the Gospel. This life is what we celebrate on Easter. We are incapable and powerless on our own, but thanks be to God who gives us His life. Amen."
- Michelle

Our Easter celebrations tend to take a different turn than most. We start out quite normally - Easter service at church, lunch with the family, photo shoot before everyone changes (ok, that might not be normal). And we have quite a large family:

Mom's side

 And then we have some other friends (who we consider family, but someone had to take the picture) who also join us for our celebrations.

Now, our Easter traditions used to be normal (or at least similar to probably half of families who celebrate Easter in the United States): Easter egg hunt in which the parents hide all the eggs for the children who then run out to find these small plastic colors stuffed with spare change and candy. Then we started getting older, and so we had two egg hunts, one for the smaller kids who each got a big kid helper and then one for the older kids, in which eggs could be hidden anywhere, including on the roof. At some point we went to three rounds, with similar rules and harder hiding spots.

And then a problem hit: we all grew up.

The youngest member of our family (at least for this year, get excited for Cinque!) is my sister who is currently 18. It does feel a little strange to hide eggs for people who are barely still teenagers.

Sister love!

 Then we realized a second problem: we had no new hiding spots.

We have celebrated Easter at my uncle and aunt's house pretty much since my family moved out of our house, roughly 12 years ago. That many years of hiding eggs makes it much more difficult to find spots that are actually hidden.

So, we had to come up with a solution. Enter: Dan and Sam.

These are the two geniuses who saved our Easter tradition.

Or something like that. Let's just say our Easters have gotten slightly crazier - they still always involve eggs, but now sometimes these eggs contain coded messages we must unscramble on the internet or notes that send us on crazy scavenger hunts around town or they count as currency in some strange Candy Land Monopoly game.

This year, however, may take the cake thus far.

Remember the game Risk that you played as a kid? Ok, technically I never played it (although I'm not sure why considering how much I like winning and domination), but I've been assured it's fun. Well, this year we played Frisk - the non-copyrighted airport security friendly version of the board game based on World War II in which service personnel invade your personal (mental) space as they frisk (your mind) by probing you (with questions) to ensure your right to (attack another country) safely.

To summarize our rather long (3 hours?) game, each player chooses a partner (Kandyce, naturally, and later Kenny and Travis when they capitulated) and two countries as a partnership (Italy and the U.K., obviously). The point of the game is to take over the world and to do this, each group's troops (eggs) face off by answering various questions and having greater numbers of fighters. 

By the end of round 4, my group had 14 countries. We won.

And then we went inside, out of the freezing cold (ok, it was probably high 50s) and had more dessert.

Easter is amazing. I love my family.