Fun on Good Friday

Good Friday is not only the start of our Easter weekend, but also our spring break here. The girls had a fun day, spending the morning with Daddy checking out a new local playground. Sara liked the rocking horse but of course, quickly wanted to follow Kacy wherever she went although she was not really able to do so. So we moved on from stop number one (pictured in the first 2 pictures) to a second playground which had 2 parts: one Kacy's size and one made just right for Sara!


Kacy loves slides and is passing this on to her sister.


And this slide was just Sara's size.



And we found a great swing for Sara that she LOVED! Kacy helped give her a push.



After a fun morning, Sara took a nap. Upon waking up, she decided to put on her "doctor" glasses.

Kacy and Sara love to play together. They don't always share or get along, but they definitely love each other. On this particular occasion, they were coloring so nicely together. Kacy was helping Sara get her page colored in.


It is fun to see how Kacy & Sara's relationship changes with time. Both are a lot of fun but also individuals in how they operate!


Sara wound the day up with giving asparagus a try for the first time and loving it like she does all her other fruits and vegetables.

On another note, I have reflected on holidays a bit recently. What do they mean and how does that meaning change when you live on the other side of the world? I am fairly sure that responses to this would change greatly on the person, and the length of time you have lived overseas would also be a factor. Laura is much more into holidays and celebrations than I am. (That probably reflects in our personalities.) As we develop our family, I have thought about what are the traditions and holidays that we need/want to emphasize with our kids. In more ancient times such as Joshua's and Moses' day, when something significant happened, people put a landmark in place. Often, this might have been a big pile of rocks. For example, Joshua 4:4-7 says:

4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever."

In our globalized world, we don't always pass the same route anymore. I recently read a section from a book that talks about how airports reflect the culture of the people where they are located. It pointed out differences between the airports in London, Paris (Charles de Gaulle), San Francisco, and Frankfurt among others. However, that is a tangent I won't chase too far for now. However, holidays often reflect culture as well. They represent important events in a nation's history. In a way, holidays are our modern stoneworks. They are monument to what has been, or maybe what should be important. There is nothing particularly special about any given day over another. My birthday will just be another Friday this year. But it isn't about the day that a given holiday falls. It is about where the holiday turns our focus. As we celebrate this Easter holiday, may our focus be turned to more than plastic eggs, but to an event that changed the human race forever. Whether it is Easter or Thanksgiving or a birthday, may we see these "stone monuments" as modern day guideposts to keep us focused on the important aspects of our lives.