and then the festivities were over

Finally! With two birthdays and two holidays all in the span of a week I'm ready to be done! We keep birthdays pretty low-key here in the Crane household. My sister-in-law gave birth to my newest niece (and first Crane granddaughter), Anna,

on Sunday March 16th (which I totally predicted) so we thought we'd keep James' birthday celebrations to just the immediate family.

Actually, Grandma Crane, Aunt Lisa, and cousin Ben came over for lunch... along with birthday presents. Thanks guys! William enjoyed "helping" James open his presents. I think William and James appreciated all the gifts equally (since William thinks that they are his). Here is James talking on his new phone. Now he can use his own instead of trying to grab mine all the time--he gets really excited each time he hears the phone ring!

And then we had cake. Mmm... At first James was more concerned about keeping William away from the cake. He gave William more than one warning glare (look at the first picture). He had a good time "messing his cake" (as William kept telling us).

And then we had more egg hunts than we could handle! Friday afternoon we went to an egg hunt at Rich's work. On Saturday morning we had a ward Easter egg hunt... and then our very own Easter Bunny came with eggs and baskets on Saturday afternoon! William was in heaven and thought it was so cool to find all the eggs.

This year we dyed eggs as well. William was really into it and would tell us that the eggs were diving into the color. One year in college we dyed eggs with Kool-aid which was so fun that I decided to do the same again this year. William loved to smell the different colors and tell us what they smelled like. (Green smelled like leaves... even though it was lemon-lime.) Our egg dying was a hit with William which equals success.

Easter Sunday we tried to remember the real meaning of the holiday and I even got William to watch The Testaments before church instead of the usual--Veggietales. (If you want to read some great thoughts on Easter click here.)

We also celebrated Rich's birthday.

Look at all that smoke!

His mom made a great cake and I made some chocolate mousse. I think he had a pretty good day.

I am glad that all the celebrating is over for a while now though. It will be nice to relax and enjoy the beautiful spring weather!