Happy Easter!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend. We don't get any days off school for Easter, but we enjoyed a lovely weekend nonetheless. On Saturday, a package arrived from the Easter Bunny: Darby and I each got a book from our Amazon wish list and 2 Reese's eggs (yum!). I love that our parents still send us holiday treats. It's so fun to get those unexpected packages.

After church this morning, we went over to our friends' house for a delicious Easter lunch of pork loin, sweet potatoes, roasted asparagus and sweet potatoes, and strawberry pie. I was so happy when they invited us. Last year, I had a lot of fun throwing an Easter brunch, but I just didn't make it a priority this year. I was kind of sad that we might not do anything special to celebrate.

Easter weekend always brings back memories of LTC (Leadership Training for Christ), which was a conference our church always went to over Easter weekend. Kids could participate in different events like chorus, puppets, drama, art, etc., and earn medals. Being the huge nerd that I was and still am, I always participated in a bunch of events. I went through my old photo albums tonight to find some pictures from LTC.

The conference was always held at really fancy hotels, so in our down time, we would go exploring. Jessica, Hannah, and I found these creepy kid statues and thought it would be cool to mimic their poses. Dorks.

Our puppet team and our famous vegetable puppets. I was always one of the three snow peas. This was our senior year, and some of our team members had graduated, so either Whitney or I had to be two peas' voices, so Stephanie could play the corn (named Corn E. Cob). Thinking back on my puppeteering days cracks me up, because it's so random. Are puppets only a big deal in the church of Christ? Or do other denominations have them, too? They're kind of creepy when you really think about it, but we always had so much fun planning and performing our skits.

Our Bible Bowl team. Bible Bowl was my favorite event. You studied one book of the Bible for several months; my dad was usually the coach, and he always came up with fun games to help us prepare. Then, all of the teams gathered in a huge ballroom and answered questions about the book. The atmosphere in that room was so tense; it's hilarious now to think how worked up I got about it. Your team sat in a line, so you couldn't see each other, and everyone displayed cubes with their answers on it. Then, they would announce the correct answer, and your scorer would hold up the number of people on your team who had gotten it right. When the number was less than 4, I was always thinking, "Who missed that one? That was easy!" I was perhaps a teensy bit high strung. But overall, it was such a fun experience, and most of my Bible knowledge is from those years. In December, I was a scorer for a small Bible Bowl competition at our church here, and it brought back so many good memories.