Happy Easter!

After the pre-Easter festivities that we attended on Good Friday, today was Easter proper. We again headed just a little ways out of town for another gathering of my inlaws: Babe-O's great-grandmother, grandparents, great aunt/uncle, and second cousins. I think they're her second cousins, I can never keep that cousin stuff straight. Unless you are dating dangerously close to your own family, it doesn't come up that much.

We got up a little after seven, hit the grocery store for green bean casserole ingredients, and had Babe-O's closed-door Easter with just us. We broke out the video camera and put her into an adorable little Easter dress so that we could capture the moment as she followed the little confetti eggs to her basket…okay, so I could hold her hands and tug her along until she arrived at her basket; same thing.

Actually it was two baskets, one from us and one from my parents back East (I always wanted to say "back East").

Ours was full of a cool selection of baby books, which I actually had not seen until today. The one from my parents was more elaborate, with a bunch of cool stuff for the baby and tasty stuff for us. Poor little sucker can't have candy yet – ha!

My parents' basket arrived last week, unassembled, with detailed and hilarious instructions on how to put it together. If I remember correctly, one of the instructions was "Place personally-selected Easter crap into basket." I laughed.

Anyway, the thing was very cute and very thoughtful and it was very cool that they went to the trouble to put it together. Very!

After that, we hit the road for the big gathering. Babe-O slept on the way there and after taking a while to warm up, seemed to have a good time. Her four cousins are all girls and run in age from something like 5 to something like 12. So they were very energetic and Babe-O eventually took an interest with them and played well, doing peek-a-boo and banging toys around. It was good to see her playing with other kids, even if they were pretty well separated from her in age.

Dinner was awesome, of course, and Babe-0 displayed outstanding manners by sitting in her booster seat and quietly gnawing on a teething biscuit for most of dinner. Sometimes we take for granted what a good kid she is, but stuff like this always reminds us.

Following a quick and pretty chilly trip to the park, we headed home, just in time for a pretty miserable bath that our slightly-overtired baby screamed most of the way through. She was good all day and earned some bathtime screaming.

Now she's upstairs with her Mom, nursing her way to sleep. Not a bad long weekend, but my sorry butt is thoroughly kicked.