A relaxing weekend (plus a few more days)
A good contrast with the previous weekend… With Pinuccia and Stefania getting a week’s holiday from school, it is a more restful time for us all. I don’t get such a holiday, but it turned out that Thursday was one of the rare Thursdays without a church meeting of some sort, and there was no band practice on Friday night due to Easter, so I did get a bit of a break from my usual commitments. (I do however have the usual Bible studies on Tuesday and Wednesday night, whilst in the family we will still be in holiday mode, so it might be difficult to make the mental shift.) We have been taking the opportunity to do some things together as a family, and the weather should be better in the next few days to be able to do some more outdoor activities like picnics and bike rides. And hopefully the health will be better also – the other three have all been sick with colds and other ailments, including fevers for three nights, but they are a bit better now.
We have also been working on creating our family Easter traditions. Now that the children are old enough to understand the meaning of Easter, we have been working out which parts of Australian and Italian culture we wanted to retain and use to explain this. Some ideas we have kept until later years when they are a bit older, but we did read stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection from the Bible on Friday and Sunday, and then had some activities to reinforce them. It helped that we went to an exhibit at the local science museum on Friday, which was about chickens hatching from eggs, so we could use that to explain why we had an egg hunt and chocolate eggs on Sunday (as a symbol of new life). We pray of course that the children will not only understand these stories, but also believe and put their trust in them.