Happy Easter!

***Warning - this is a long, picture heavy post!

Well, Happy Easter everyone and I hope you're enjoying a long weekend of family and friends.  This is one of those weekends where I always seem to take a step back to look at all the wonderful things in my life that I'm thankful for...

It's been a busy weekend too though with me working all day Friday (since we were closed Fri night for my usual shift).  I came home with the intent of working on some cards for work, but the power went out because of this crazy, gusty wind storm we were having.  It ended up just being an early night to get to bed. 

I then taught 2 classes yesterday, so I was gone all day again!  We did manage to pop over to see our neighbour for a few minutes and take her a card and some flowers.  We also coloured some eggs last night.  Kyle was pretty much heading for bed when he suddenly decided we'd better leave some carrots for the Easter Bunny, so we got out the one big one we had and a handful of little ones! 

Didn't feel all that hot last night and didn't sleep too well, but the boys were up early this morning.  Kyle, in particular, was up at 6am though we held him off from waking up Nathan for about 40 minutes.  Kyle came in with a very loud "Happy Easter" this morning - very cute.  There was a trail of little chocolate eggs to a basket in the kitchen with a chocolate bunny, Lego for Nathan, a Bionicle for Kyle and a skipping rope for each of them.  The skipping rope was a big hit, especially since Kyle is getting ready for "Jump Rope for Heart" at school.  Then, there were a few plastic egss hidden that they went hunting for and there was money in a few and jelly beans in a few.  A really fun morning!

We decided that since it was still early, we'd trying heading out for breakfast.  It was a little after 9am when we got to IHOP and there wasn't a wait at all surprisingly though even by the time we were leaving, there wasn't a parking spot in the lot! 

Since it was a nice day, we thought we'd go for a little drive.  George had an idea of somewhere to go and he was nice enough to come home and get the camera first and I'm SO glad he did...

We stopped at Save-On to get some bird food and then went to the bird sanctuary.  We didn't even actually go into the sanctuary - this is the area around the parking lot!  The kids had so much fun feeding the ducks!  Nathan didn't want to stand while feeding them, but was lovin' it and kept saying over and over "They're coming to me!  They're coming to me!"  A great day to stop here and a $1.27 on bird food well spent!

On the way home, we stopped and rented a Wii game for the boys, so they're playing that now and George is puttering with some things.  I was checking out some stuff online and saw the new challenges at Challenge Masters and was inspired!  I have been seeing all these tutorials for "box flowers" and wanting to try them, so when I saw that the Technique Challenge was creating your own faux flower and then using it on something, I was all over this with my scraps (other than the card base!).

Used some little scraps from a recent class I taught.  It was the Little Sprout line from Fancy Pants that I did a mini bag book with and they were perfect colours for an Easter card.  May have to make a few more of them for Easter cards!  I can see more of these in my future though I have to say that you certainly couldn't mail them because of their dimension and they wouldn't work on a scrapbook page for the same reason!

Check out this little video tutorial (not mine!) if you're interested in trying these!

OK, well that's about the size of our day to this point.  Think I'm going to go relax for a few minutes and then I have creative work for upcoming classes that I need to be doing today as well! 

Have a fabulous day and Happy Easter once again!
Cheers,