Easter 2010, Come and Gone

How was everyone's Easter celebration? I can't believe another one has come and gone. I love Easter but this year I was approaching it with a bit of trepidation. See, my oldest girl, wasn't going to be here. She had to prepare for a missions trip that she was leaving on today and it would have just been too time crunched to come home for the Easter holiday. This was the first time ever my little family wasn't all together for a major holiday. I tried not to think to hard about it. Tried to push it to the back of my mind.

To help me with that, I invited 8 other family over for Easter lunch. I figured if I kept busy that day I wouldn't have time to notice too badly she wasn't here. I had a plan. I had to have turkey because I needed to use up the one sitting in my freezer. So I thought I would cook that Saturday, nice and leisurely, and have it carved and ready to go for Sunday after church. I thought I'd keep it simple with just easy to prep veggies, carrots, peas, potatoes. Yup, nice and simple.

Yes, but this is my world we're talking about. First I forgot to take out the turkey Friday night. So instead of it being in the oven by noon on Saturday it was in the sink underwater starting the thaw. It made it in the oven at 7 p.m. At 1 a.m. I finally had it cooked and packed away and got to bed. Hubby graciously carved it Sunday morning before church.

Now we were supposed to race home immediately after church so that I could get the nice, simple veggies on the stove cooking all ready for the company coming at 1:30. Yup, nice and simple. Except we kept misplacing family members at church. Twenty minutes later we finally left. But the plan was still in place. I was patting myself on the back for my plan, simple was especially good now that we were a tad behind. But what's a holiday dinner without a few little glitches, right? I'm so smart having a simple plan. Pat, pat, pat on the back some more. That is until I proceeded to plug up the kitchen garberator and pipes with the potato peelings. And plug it I did. Big time. Not nice and handy a foot into the pipes. Way down somewhere in the basement. Way, way down. Never let it be said I do things halfway. It took my hubby and two brother's in law about 3 hours to unplug the thing. I very charitably let them take a break to eat. My hubby is still talking about the wonderful, simple Easter we had. I am now no longer allowed to garberate potato peelings. So much for nice and simple. It was interesting trying to cook for 12 people with no access to a kitchen sink. Fun times. But hey, I kept busy and didn't have time to dwell on the fact that my oldest wasn't there. Funny buy coincidentally neither did hubby.

In spite of it all, dinner was still delicious, albeit not quite on the table on time and with no pictures. We overate as par usual and had a lovely afternoon visiting, laughing (well except for hubby, he was concentrating too hard on trying to get that plug moving) and celebrating the resurrection of our Lord Jesus. I still missed my girl horribly but I made it through without tears. And we still had a load of dishes running in the dishwasher that evening. A lovely reminder that I am still very thankful for the day and age that God allowed me to be born in. For a while there I thought I'd be hauling my dirty dishes down to the river in remembrance of our pioneer predecessors.