We’re not as young and energetic as we used to be so it’s kind of nice to simplify our Holidays. We didn’t even attempt to see everyone this year. Ty and Megan went to the farm, so we all had dinner with my folks on Palm Sunday. We missed the rest of the crew this week but a lot of us are getting together next Saturday at the twin’s coming out party so I felt no guilt whatsoever at just skipping the Hubbell gathering at Easter.
Sorry, Great One, we’ll have to catch you next time around!
Jay and I thought it would be nice to go to the Basilica for Easter mass. That’s our home parish, even though we rarely make it downtown for Mass anymore. Zack said “Sure, let’s go downtown. Who wants to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior surrounded by people we celebrate Mass with on a weekly basis?”
Zack can be very sarcastic. I have no idea where he gets it from.
It was a beautiful warm spring day: exactly what you think of when you think Easter Sunday. We headed out nice and early because the Basilica always fills up fast on Holidays. We arrived a half hour before the service was to begin, only to find the doors to the main church already closed and ushers shooing everyone down to the overflow room.
We hadn’t come downtown to watch Mass on the jumbotron in the basement. We just looked at each other, turned around and came home. There was time for another cup of coffee before heading to our neighborhood church. We go there all the time: we really should make it official. Yes, I love going to Basilica once in a while but we haven’t gone there regularly in ten years! We should support the church we go to and visit the other instead of the other way around.
Katie (sans babies) was there, along with MJ and her whole crew, looking like $5,000,000.00 in their Easter finery. Mass was lovely.
Then we went home and Jay fixed the three of us a delightful brunch before we packed up the car and went west to Lake Francis, where brother Tim was hosting the entire Pivec crew. I was really looking forward to it, not just because holidays are always fun or because Tim and Mary Lou’s place on the water is great but because we had five, count ‘em five new family members under the age of six months. Two baby boys and three baby girls! All cute, smiley little boops.
Jay and Adam spent the entire day down on the dock, fishing. The pontoon was in the water and boat rides occurred. Despite the fact that there were nearly 40 people in attendance, the house didn’t feel at all crowded. Tim and Mary Lou built a big, gorgeous log home with three open levels, perfect for entertaining and including three separate outdoor entertainment spots as well.
Dinner was great, as usual. I heard later that some of the offerings were gone before a few unfortunate late comers arrived. Two lessons in that: make more food and maps are better than GPS. Still, if only ten percent of the guests were unsatisfied, that’s a pretty good percentage.
It always amuses me to think back just a few years, when there were no little kids in the family. For about a decade, all we had were three girls, about eleven years apart. Sophie carried the entire third generation around here for about six years. Now she’s merely the oldest of over a dozen and that’s just the Midwestern wing of the family.
It was a fun, beautiful, exhausting day, celebrating the fact that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to Liberate us all from death. Now that is something worth celebrating.
Halleluiah!