Easter Weekend

For all Mormons living in America and timezones within reasonable reach of Utah, last weekend was Conference Weekend, in addition to being Easter weekend.  But since an eleven-hour time difference turns a ten o'clock morning session into a nine o'clock night session, we did not watch conference last weekend.  We had firm plans to watch it this weekend, pretending that conference was just delayed by a week.  Unfortunately, one of our members had work all weekend, so next week we have conference.  That's the great thing about home-churching: scheduling is a lot more flexible.

So instead of watching eight hours of Conference talks last weekend, we celebrated Easter.  We attended the embassy Easter egg hunt hosted by the CLO Saturday morning.  Brandon and I debated about going - attending any social event with five small-ish children is a guaranteed workout- but finally were persuaded by the children.  It was the first sunny Saturday in a few weeks, so I wanted to go hiking.  Somehow the children didn't agree that walking up a hill and getting sweaty would be better than looking for free candy.

One of our CLOs enjoys throwing big parties, so eighty one American and Tajik children showed up to eat hot dogs, get their face painted, make bunny ear hats, play games, and most importantly, find their six eggs that had candy in them.  The children enjoyed running around with friends and picking dandelions from the lawn.  I enjoyed getting to know a new mission member, pretending to be an old pro at living in Dushanbe.

Sunday we had church in the morning.  Neither Brandon's family or my family had Easter baskets growing up and so we haven't even thought about having them as part of our Easter traditions.  I remember getting a new Easter dress every year, but that didn't make it to our family traditions either.  Sadly, we're pretty lacking in any Easter traditions.  I don't remember the last time we dyed eggs.  I'll have to work on that next year.

We did have Easter dinner together with friends, however, which is an Easter tradition I do like.  Some holidays aren't much fun when they're celebrated alone.  We got to be part of their Easter tradition - a double-elimination egg roll tournament.  The children had a great time rolling eggs, trying to crack the other person's and perhaps win it all.  Sophia ended up triumphing over all thirteen contestants, beating all comers with the same egg each round.

And that was Easter weekend.  Nothing fancy and nothing particularly profound.  But we did have fun and the children got candy, so that's got to count for something.