7 Quick Takes about Easter Decor, Having It All Together at the Dentist's Office, and Just Being Yourself

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It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Ever since this talk in general conference last year, I have been thinking that I'd like to revamp the way our family looks forward to and celebrates Easter. 

I spend at least a month gearing up for Christmas talking about Jesus with my kids, but usually Easter sneaks up on us and we're lucky to have a few days. I have three big tubs of Christmas decorations, a lot of them nativity-themed in some way, but a grand total of zero Easter decorations. Seems backward, since Easter is the whole point of Christianity, doesn't it? So this week I've been intentionally trying to take baby steps toward celebrating Easter with as much as (if not more) anticipation and enthusiasm as Christmas in a meaningful way.

The first thing I did was go online and get a few inexpensive Easter decorations for around the house that will help us remember what we're celebrating.

I hung this 8x8" wooden pallet sign in our powder room, and I know it's working because several times a day, I hear people exiting the bathroom humming the Easter hymn "He is Risen." I just cackle and continue writing my screenplay Inception: An Easter Story.

I also hung this wreath on the living room wall next to a picture of Jesus that was already there.

Amazon sells this as a door wreath but unless you live in a hobbit hole it will be too small for that, better as part of a wall collage of some sort.

This small tabletop empty tomb decoration may not get here until after Easter, but that's fine. I'll have it for next year:

Lastly, I found a high-resolution image of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, the place popularly shown to tourists as the tomb where Jesus was buried (probably not really, but it's the symbolism we're after here,) and got it printed as a 16x20 (with a coupon!) on Snapfish. I've been to Michael's to scope out 16x20 frames, and I think I found a beautiful one that I can order online with a coupon. I'm really excited to put it together and display it on the mantel when everything gets here.

And this is not really related... but it sort of is. When I was poking around Amazon looking for Easter decor, I came across this super-cute shirt that made me smile.

—2—

Apparently I'm not the only one who's been thinking this way, because when I went to this month's Relief Society (the women's organization of my church) activity, we made an Easter "advent calendar" to help our families focus on Easter. 

We filled 12 plastic eggs with Christ-focused Easter activities, scriptures, and QR codes leading to Easter-themed videos or songs. Yes, some of them also have chocolates. 

We put the filled eggs in egg cartons, but for next year I plan to do what the woman teaching does with hers. She displays them on the wall in an empty picture frame with wire strung across it horizontally, the eggs hanging from the wires on ornament hooks. I wish I'd taken a picture but I didn't think of it until after I'd already gone home.

—3—

While I've been getting my act together in one department, it's been falling apart in others. I was running around trying to get out of the house for a 10AM dentist appointment (my kids helped by missing the bus so I had to give them rides to school as well as get myself ready.)

I dashed up to the front desk at the dentist's office just a few minutes after 10 and said I was there for my appointment, which the receptionist informed me had actually been at 9.

"Well, can I reschedule right now?" I asked.

"Have you filled out your paperwork?"

"Huh?" I asked, clearly on top of everything that is going on in my life.

"We sent you some paperwork and it needs to be filled out before we can book your next appointment. Do you have your insurance card?"

Well, NO because I'd left my purse at home in my hurry to get out the door an hour late to my appointment but THANKS FOR ASKING! 

In my defense, we discovered that she'd sent the forms to the wrong email address so it wasn't completely my fault that I looked like an idiot. It was only mostly my fault that I looked like an idiot.

—4—

My 10-year-old celebrated a birthday with some friends, and wow. The only thing louder than a 10 year old girl is a 10-year-old boy. And the only thing louder than a 10-year-old boy is a group of 10-year-old boys. I know it's not how it works, but I think we broke the sound barrier.

And my son was given a ton of candy.

—5—

I've been using a fun website called lyricstraining.com. It's a game where you listen to foreign-language music videos and type in the missing lyrics, helping you to "hear" them better. I use it for Spanish but I think they have all kinds of languages.

The amazing little girl in the video "Soy Yo" was killing me, and I don't think you even need to understand Spanish to appreciate it. (Here is a translation of the lyrics, but the gist of the song is that haters gonna hate and it's okay if no one gets you, just be yourself.) "Soy yo" means "it's me."

—6—

I have an autoimmune disease called discoid lupus, and there are a few different medications you can take to manage it. 

For a while, I was on the immunosuppressants that organ transplant patients take to keep their bodies from rejecting their new organ, and while it worked for the lupus it meant I was constantly feeling crappy from the 8 billion germs that my 6 kids brought home from school every day that my immune system couldn't fight off.

So I begged my rheumatologist to put me on something else, and he prescribed an anti-malarial drug. The problem is that my dosage is too high, permanent eye damage is a side effect (especially on a high dose), and it's not working as well to manage the lupus. So as of this week I'm back on the immunosuppressants.

It's been four days, and one of my kids is home sick from school already so I'm certainly going to be next. I'm not sure I can do this.

—7—

We aren't a tennis-playing family, but we do have rackets and balls and go out once or twice a year to act like we know what we're doing. 

One nice afternoon I loaded the kids in the van with the promise of playing tennis and this is what we saw when we got there:

The tennis courts were literally being demolished with excavators before our eyes.

Pretty ironic, but it gets better. There's another court not too faraway that is definitely in poor shape (cracked pavement, etc) but the kids really wanted to play tennis, so we drove there... and THAT one was torn out, too! After that we just gave up and went for a walk.

There is one other tennis court in town that I know of and I'm willing to go there next time, but if that one is also bulldozed then I'm hanging up my racket and considering our tennis days over.

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