evan, lindsay, nina, elena and esther

We're back! We had to reconfigure something in our blog. If you scroll down you can see some older posts that I just put up today.

Also, Nina had a few exciting firsts today!!! I'll start with the most important.

Her first Easter celebration! ----She was around for easter last year but this was her first with any participation. We were motivated by general conference to make this a meaningful easter for Nina, but crepes and what I call an easter egg 'scatter' (we didn't hide them, just scattered them on the floor for Soren, Clark, and her to find and open) were the best we could come up with. Maybe when she's a year or two older we'll try to make traditions that include more meaning. We don't want the easter bunny and candy to be the focus on such a sacred holiday.

Her first kiss She and Vaughn puckered up multiple times today. It was momentous. Probably more exciting to us parents than to them.

Throwing She threw her shoe into a basket and missed, and then she was practicing throwing easter candy and stuff. It was the first time I've seen her do anything close to throwing.


I have an easter side note. We had an interesting chat with a friend about Easter. Prior to him converting to the lds church in his late teens, he says that he misunderstood easter. All he knew about easter was a vague recollection that Jesus died on the cross. Essential, yes, but only a fraction of the story. In fact he said that even as a christian, his knowledge about Jesus didn't go much beyond that and the fact that Jesus' life entailed sermons and miracles. He didn't know anything about Christ's atonement in the garden of Gethsemane, or anything about Jesus' resurrection on the third day. Or what those things mean to us personally. That's a lot of the story he was missing. I found that interesting. I thought to myself why that was. It wasn't necessarily any misdeed on his part.

As we were talking I was reminded of one of the things we heard in a conference talk today - that reformers like William Tindale and Martin Luther and many others did so much to bring biblical literacy to the masses. Yet ironically now, hundreds of years later, with the bible being so widely available, there is increasing biblical illiteracy. Less and less christians are reading it or other scripture to learn about Jesus' life and teachings. William Tindale was burned and martyred. Other reformers sacrificed all and their lives so we could have precious scripture available to us. Are we using it and do we value it as much as they did? I hope to keep daily reading of the bible and book of mormon a practice in our home for our kids' sakes as we all try to follow our Savior and understand all He does for us.