church

Holy Week and Easter

Lent went by especially quickly this year, and Holy Week was no exception…it was a complete blur!

On Palm Sunday, Ladybug turned my palm into a cross as she always does:

On Monday, we baked hot cross buns:

Tuesday, Chickadee and I visited the Tulip Trail at Eckert’s with the hope of cutting our own tulips for our Easter table…that didn’t work out, but it was still a beautiful experience!

On Wednesday, I made one of our favorite Lenten dinners, fish tacos:

Thursday found us at church for the first service the Holy Triduum:

Before Church on Friday we made this year’s Paschal Candle, and Bunny and I did some pre-Easter baking:

On Holy Saturday I prepped some salads and our mini donut tray for the year…I found a record 18 different kinds!

The Great Vigil of Easter is still my favorite church service of the entire year (even when we have to start indoors because rain made the church garden too mucky)!

After church, we stoped at Wendy’s for fries and a Frosty for everyone:

Easter morning was a bit chilly, but clear and beautiful!

The church looked glorious, as always:

And we got a nice family photo after the service thanks to our field worker from the seminary:

Easter is the one day a year we have a big, fancy breakfast…I even put a little extra effort into setting the table, using some pretty plates I found at Aldi a few years ago that are just the perfect color palette for the day:

We had a pretty traditional meal…biscuits with a choice of sausage gravy or Pflaumenmus (plum butter), scrambled eggs, sausage patties, brie (also good with the plum butter!), fruit salad, pomegranate and orange juices, and did I mention mini donuts?

We had a fun afternoon watching the first two Big, Fat, Greek Wedding movies, and then it was time to reset the table for dinner:

We went Italian for Easter dinner, featuring Peposo (beef cooked with garlic and peppercorns in red wine), lemon-parmesan risotto, braised radicchio with a balsamic glaze, breaded baked artichokes, antipasto salad, and Colomba di Pasqua (a sweet Italian Easter bread) with more Pflaumenmus.

And for dessert, panna cotta with a blueberry-lemon sauce and fresh berries:

This was a great, although busy, Holy Week and Easter! Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Fourteen and Fantastic

The weekend of birthday celebrations continued today!

Chickadee started the morning off at church, where the congregation sang “Happy Birthday” to her after the service!

When we got home, she opened her presents:

For breakfast, she wanted the coffee cake we always have on Christmas, with a twist…this time, I made it with strawberries instead of cherries.

She requested “Brinner” (breakfast for dinner) for her birthday dinner, featuring Mickey waffles, scrambled eggs, sausage, a delicious fruit salad, and strawberry milk tea with popping boba:

And she picked a chocolate chip cookie cake for her birthday…the decorations were inspired by the colors of the Honmoon in KPop Demon Hunters.

I had such a fun time celebrating my youngest (who isn’t that terribly young anymore!) today!

Chickadee Thursday

Chickadee got to play a new-to-us cooperative Disney game, “Animated,” at a youth event after church on Sunday…she picked the original Disney classic Snow White to “animate.”

Christmas 2025

It doesn’t seem possible, but Christmas Eve and Day have come and gone already!

Our celebration started on Christmas Eve morning, with Christmas Crunch:

I made time early in the day to deliver gifts to all of my neighbors on Gloriana, and also chased Roald around my island for a bit, trying to get the perfect picture (which I did).

Bunny had to work in the morning, but when she got home, she put the finishing touches on this year’s Advent Lego project, Rivendell:

And then we went to my second-favorite service of the entire church year, Christmas Eve candlelight:

Candlelight being a relative term, as it was still fairly light out when the service was over. We didn’t stop by the city of St. Louis Christmas tree downtown this year, so it was pretty bright for our drive through the Way of Lights!

When we got home, I made wassail, which was a bit of a change for us…I think it may become a new tradition!

And we enjoyed a gingerbread layer cake with gingerbread mousse filling and molasses cream cheese frosting, and topped with sugared cranberries for dessert.

We also played our new Christmas Eve board game, Ticket to Ride Northern Lights. I lost spectacularly, but not as spectacularly as Ladybug won!

We watched the San Francisco Ballet Nutcracker and Rick Steves’ European Christmas, and then I filled the stockings and escorted Mary and Joseph to the stable. I hope there’s never a day when we don’t want to put up the Little People nativity, even though we no longer have any little people living in our home1

On Christmas Day morning, we enjoyed our favorite coffee cake:

And then we went back to church, nice and early so I could get some pictures in front of the beautiful church Christmas tree:

Our church is always beautiful, but there’s something extra special about it at Christmastime!

The family picture we took after the service is probably one of the nicest ones we’ve ever taken!

We opened presents when we got home, and then I got started on dinner, the best dinner of the year, the famed “Pick Out Dinner!”

Setting the table is pretty low-key compared to Thanksgiving, but I still like to make it look nice, including napkins folded like Christmas trees. I added a few small Christmas trees to our traditional centerpiece of the Advent wreath…they balanced out the additional candles I often add quite nicely!

We had quite the spread this year!

We spent the afternoon and evening watching Christmas movies, playing games, and building Lego sets. The weather was far too warm for Christmas (it felt, smelled, and sounded like Easter!), but thankfully the weather isn’t what makes for a good Christmas, and we had a lovely day. And luckily for us, Christmas lasts for 12 days, so we still have our “fancy” (although dialed back a bit this year thanks to rising grocery costs) dinner and more cookie baking to look forward to…and maybe even some colder weather! Merry Christmas!!!

Advent 2025–Day Twenty-Two

Here we are at Advent IV already!

Today Chickadee added some trees to Lego Rivendell with the contents of bags 42 & 43:

Here’s a closer look at the larger one:

With only three days of Advent left, the set really is close to complete…the largest piece missing is Elrond’s table:

And only Elrond himself and Aragorn are missing from the cast of characters:

I can’t believe Christmas is this week!

Advent 2025–Day Eleven

I love the quiet contemplation of Advent midweek services!

Turkey built bags 20, 21, and 22 to finish off the first book of instructions of Lego Rivendell. This gazebo is my favorite part of the set…it’s so delicate and pretty! Turkey was impressed by what a challenging build it was, and that’s really saying something coming from a Lego expert like him!

He also added Arwen…I love the attention to detail, including her pointy elf ears and the Evenstar necklace:

The set is between 1/3 and 1/2 complete, and I’m already blown away by how detailed and gorgeous it is!

Advent 2025–Day One

Happy Advent!

After taking a break from building a big Lego set during Advent last year to build a chess set, we’re back with a very special set (and what might honestly be our last really extravagant Advent project)…Lego Rivendell! Turkey took care of the first two bags today, beginning the base of the structure:

And Frodo and the ring, of course!

The Fab Five have really been into The Lord of the Rings during the second half of this year, trading the worn copies of the books we have and impatiently waiting for the volume they’re ready to read to be finished by whoever currently has it, and watching the movies on repeat. I’ve thought Rivendell is the most visually beautiful set Lego has ever made since it first came out, but the steep cost had prevented me from adding it to our extensive Lego collection. I finally figured out a way to make it work, and I’m really excited that the Fab Five get to build this set, because it’s one they have all had their eyes on, too. The bag numbering system works out almost perfectly…this year there are 25 days in Advent, and there are 49 bags in the set, which means that other than one day, they’ll build exactly two bags each day during the season. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it comes together (and trying to figure out where it’s going to go when it’s complete, because it’s a BIG set!).