He is Risen (and all associated celebrations)

Five years ago when my husband and I first left middle America, the issue of how to celebrate Easter with no family and no small children around became a bit of a problem for me. Easter is the most important holiday of the year to me, but as bunnies and dyed eggs are a bit immature and no one ever invited us to their family Easter barbecues, Craig and I generally did nothing special to celebrate. We went to church (as usual) and then tried to find things to do. That first year, we did absolutely nothing. The next, I actually did make a ham for just the two of us. Another year, we hiked the mountain behind our house (this was in Colorado).

Well, thankfully our current church offers an Easter sunrise service each year. It's a nice way to do something out-of-the-ordinary to celebrate when there's not much else. We rolled out of bed at 5am, bundled into tights and sweaters and thick fuzzy socks; we packed hats and blankets. Last year, the sunrise service was cold and misty, but this year we found the blankets and hats superfluous. It was a beautiful morning. We started singing while it was still dark and by the time worship was over, the sky was full of lavenders and pinks. A friend of ours attended the service with us and, after the service, he and two of our other friends came over for an early Easter brunch. There was a mushroom and onion quiche, turkey bacon (alas, pork has been rendering me inexplicably ill since my pregnancy), hashbrowns, a spinach salad, and fresh pineapple, strawberries, and kumquats. We played word games and then tried our hand at a Lord of the Rings trivia game but quickly learned that our level of nerd-dom is not quite high enough to be successful at such a game.

When our friends left around noon, Craig and I proceeded to take a two-hour nap. (This was perhaps the highlight of the entire day.) And then life fell back into place a bit. I called my family, we washed dishes, ran out to buy laundry detergent, ran some loads of laundry, took the dogs out for some fresh air, played more word games, read, and ended with a movie and popcorn.


In the midst of all that, while we washed dishes, we noticed our "new" rocking chair (a friend's grandfather made it but she's passed it along to us) inexplicably rocking. We chalked it up to the dogs. An hour or two later when friends started asking us if we felt "the quake," we were totally confused. Craig looked up his go-to quake website and said it wasn't reporting any quakes and we decided just to ignore everyone. This morning, when family (from clear out in middle America) asked about the quake, we decided to look again. We went to a different website and lo and behold, there it was: a 7.2 in Baja California, Mexico. Apparently Craig's go-to website doesn't include Mexico on its map. Perhaps not the most helpful go-to quake website after all for people living in southern California.

But the real celebration took place hours after going to bed and hours before getting out of bed. Everyone says that 3rd trimester women don't get any sleep. They blame this on simple and inexplicable insomnia, on acid reflux and gas, on bladders pressed to near-bursting, on searing back pain, and on intense, hormone-driven dreams. Well, no one told me that I could be kept awake at night by the actual baby herself! About 2 or 3 in the morning, I woke up not because I had to pee and not because acid was burning my throat but because my little girl decided to throw a dance party inside my belly. If she were 13 years old I'd do something about this, but as it was all I could do was lay there and wait for her to tire out. Who knows? Maybe this was her way of celebrating.