Easter 2016 summary

It seems Easter time is the busiest in our life as I'm always late with the summary of our celebrations. This is the same this year too. It's June already and I've just finished writing about our Easter 2016.

A few days before Easter we decorated our egg tree (catkins twigs). E. was very excited when we opened the Eater decoration boxes. She, almost all by herself, did the whole decoration. (Baby Sis was helping her out with some cooing)

She also found some earlier egg matching activity I had written about in an earlier post. Of course, she needed to do it quickly.

At this time we had been painting eggs for weeks. Most of them were blown-out eggshells therefore rather fragile. (I broke some of them after Easter time).

We also prepared some Styrofoam eggs as well. First, we painted them red, then, as E. was quite fascinated by the pins in my sewing kit box, I let her decorate her red egg with multicoloured pins.

As always E. (and this time Baby Sis, too) was sprinkled by some family members (Daddy and Grandpa) as well as Godfather in the morning. She was well prepared in her rabbit costume.

Sprinkling from Daddy

Kisses to Grandpa

Later on we went to the playground. Daddy ran ahead and hid some presents in the grass while we were slowly walking towards the area. By the time we arrived we saw Daddy quarreling with an 8-10 year boy and his mum as the boy had taken away and almost opened one of the eggs. Nice beginning... Luckily everything was calm and quiet when we arrived and E. could look for her presents.

collecting

a bit of reading

finishing the egg hunt with swinging

This year these were the presents:

• a Green eggs and ham By Dr. Seuss
• a Shopkins egg
• a Smarties egg
• a Hello Kitty dining room set
• a tiny stapler
• hair bobbles hidden in a plastic egg (not in the picture)
• gummies hidden in a plastic egg (not in the picture)

All in all, our Easter was great with lots of Hungarian and a little English, but we all enjoyed ourselves.

Easter patterns

We've already covered the basic patterns when we were talking about clothes, but decorating Easter eggs has brought the topic up again.

Checked, flowery, stripy, plain, spotty were the words to revise. Much to my surprise E. remembered them.

We did a little painting but E. was not willing to paint patterns, so I followed her lead. It was long time ago when I gave up sticking to a project.

At another occasion I drew Easter eggs on the whiteboard and also the name of their patterns mixed up. She enjoyed matching the words and the patterns. She also mentioned that we can call something spotty polka-dotted as well.

That's all about patterns at Easter. I'll come back with another post on our Easter this year.

Easter egg crafts

There's no Easter without eggs. Egg painting, egg making, blowing out eggs, eating eggs, sticking egg, decorating with eggs and so on.

Here are a few things we've been doing with eggs lately.


Decor tape eggs

Just draw an egg and supply your little one with some decor tape or washi tape. Be prepared: tape will be everywhere. In hair, on clothes and some on your drawn egg, too. If you want to save a pretty decor tape, do NOT give it into the hands of a 3 year old.

A lot of cutting is involved, which is great practice for little hands.

If you put it around the house all your guests can admire the final product.

While doing it we were talking about the different colours and patterns on the tapes.

Dot marker eggs

The original plan was to follow some patterns (ABAB or ABBABB), but it didn't work that way. I plan something and E. thinks differently. So we went with the flow. Some hand painting, making fingerprints, drawing lines, colouring freely etc.

You can print or draw an egg shape and provide your child with dot-markers. (If you don't have one you can also your some paint and wine cork or your child can use her finger)

Pom-pom painting 

This is a variation of the dot marker painting. If you don't have dot markers use pom-pom and clothes pegs.

First, E. started to use the colours one by one (although she was drawing with the pom-poms like with a paintbrush; she refused to make dots like with the dot marker)

Then colour mixing kicked it.

I was crazy enough to let her sprinkle a little glitter over the wet, painted eggs (well, never again, it's more than MESSY). I must admit she helped me happily with the cleaning up.

After they have dried I cut them out, added a ribbon and stuck them on the door frame in our living-room.

Of course, we had some traditional egg painting (with blown out eggs and acrylic paint, which E. calls "the big girl paint"). On Sunday during church time, children could paint eggs. There and then we tried wax crayon drawing and painting on eggs for the first time which is beautiful. I have a plan for next year's egg painting.

According to the Hungarian tradition, we also decorated a bunch of goat/pussy willow (which we simply call catkins) with eggs and other ornaments.

I hope you'll have an EGG-cellent Easter!

Easter Bunny and chick craft

This year I've hardly had any time to prepare Easter activities. My main focus was to find fun crafts that are easy to prepare and I can find the necessary supplies here at home.

Pussy/goat willow (Barka in Hungarian) Easter Bunny 

I bought some branches of pussy or goat willow. Honestly, I hate the English name of this beautiful plant, so we just call it catkin, the name referring to this kind of flower.

Anyway, I picked the catkins off the branch, placed them in bowl. I printed a bunny (more precisely 2 types of rabbit colouring pages) from the net and stuck it on card stock. I also added some glue and the fun could begin.

My daughter's idea of fun was different. After having stuck 8-10 catkins on the body of the bunny she told me: - Let's do it tomorrow.

Then she left. She tried it with Daddy the next day and they finished the rabbits more or less. The heads were still missing.

We are almost there

So on the third day we managed to finish the whole rabbit.

Split pea chick (Sárgaborsó csibe in Hungarian)

On our usually grocery shopping I picked up a bag of split peas forgetting that E. won't eat it, so I used some of it in our craft. Again, I just printed a chick from the net served E. with the split peas (raw) and glue.

After applying the glue all over the chick with a paintbrush, she enjoyed sprinkling the split peas on the chick, then pouring the excess back into the bowl.

The final art pieces have been stuck on our living-room door.

I took the ideas (Catkin Bunny, I couldn't find the Split Pea Chick idea again) from Pinterest collections on Easter crafts.

HOPPY EASTER, EVERYONE!

Easter 2014 - a very belated post

I was going through my blog and I was shocked to see I'd forgotten to write a summary of our Easter last year. I posted a lot of ideas and activities on my facebook page, but no summary here whatsoever. I need to make up for this shortcoming.

A quick post in pictures...

Inexpensive Easter gift tags. After having taken them out of their basic sheet I photocopied them and stick a picture in each place. E. had to match them.

Washi tape/Decor tape eggs - I covered some egg-shape cutouts with colourful washi tapes and decor tapes. Then I laminated them and halved them in different ways. Also, I wrote numbers on them from 1-10. She loved this activity and I'm sure we'll do it this year too.

Easter basket - details in the pic

We painted some foam eggs. Additional fun with some beads and feathers. 

Concentration on full blast

Easter gift hunt in the playground nearby

Five minutes before my husband and daughter, I went to the playground and spread some gifts in the grass (as we have no garden this seemed to be the best solution for making an egg hunt happen)

Then they came and E. hunted

Ready for the hunt with the home-made basket

A magnetic drawing board

Spot's First Easter

Stickers

Opening an Easter (surprise) egg

Let's not forget about the Hungarian tradition: Easter sprinkling

All the presents E. hunted and got from the grandparents last Easter

I hope this little retrospection will give you some ideas for this Easter. For me it was great pleaseure to look back on what happened a year ago. I'll be back with more activities we're doing for this Easter.