Easter weekend (and an eight-legged nightmare)

I hope everyone had a great Easter!

Jerry had to work on Easter, which was kind of a bummer, but we are used to his odd schedule. He works a lot of holidays, so when that happens, we just celebrate on a different day when he is off work. We did hide Easter eggs for this kids on Sunday morning, though. Instead of coloring eggs this year, I just bought a few dozen plastic eggs and put a piece of candy in each one (and each of the two "golden eggs" had $10 in it).

Even though the boys are a little older, at 11 and 12, they still loved finding the eggs. Jerry and I had fun hiding them, too. Then, we gave them their Easter baskets, and that was that as far as Easter goes. Since Jerry was off Monday, we decided to have our Easter dinner and do some family stuff then.

I spent most of the day cleaning out the garage and pulling weeds from the landscaping. I was feeling good, better than I have in a while, and I wanted to get some stuff done. My friend Adam walked over and I chatted with him for a bit, too, before he continued on to walk a half-marathon just for fun on Easter morning ;)

Late Sunday afternoon, Becky came over with Lucas for a couple of hours. He gets bigger every time I see him! I can't believe how fast he's growing. We weighed him while he was here, and he was about 10 pounds. It's funny, because Eli was almost 10 pounds when he was born; and Lucas is about five weeks old. He is looking more like an infant now and not so much like a newborn. And he's starting to coo, which is adorable!

Lucas was totally sprawled out over Eli

While they were here, Noah and Eli were excited to show Becky some old home videos of them. I love watching videos from when the boys were little--their voices were just so cute! I never realized their voices were changing as it was happening, because I heard them every single day; and then when I watched the old videos, the change is huge. It's interesting to watch Lucas grow, because I only see him about once a week--so I can actually see the differences each time.

On Sunday night, I was getting ready for bed, and when I went into the bathroom, I saw the BIGGEST spider I'd ever seen in my life. It was right by the doorway, and I screamed. I couldn't believe the size of it! I looked around for something I could use to kill it, and grabbed some hairspray. The pump wasn't working for some reason! So I frantically dug around and found some spray gel. I sprayed it once, and the spider ran into my bedroom--awesome. (Jerry was at work, otherwise I would have designated him to get rid of it.)

I was not about to let it out of my sight, so I went into the bedroom and watched as it crawled behind some shelves. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper to try to smash it, but when I reached forward, it ran under the shelves. I started screaming again and Eli came in to ask if everything was okay. He held a flashlight while I moved the shelf out, and looked underneath. It was

gone

.

I panicked, and started searching everywhere around the shelves, under my bed, under my dresser--it was NOWHERE. We looked for about 15 minutes, and I was seriously thinking I was going to have to burn down the house, because there was no way I was going to sleep in my bed knowing that the spider was somewhere in my room.

Joey and the cats knew something was going on, because they were all crowded around us in my bedroom. Eli said he heard a light tapping, and he saw Estelle inside my closet, batting her paw at something. My cats are the BEST when it comes to finding spiders, so I had a feeling she'd found it. When I went in there, she was staring at something very closely, but I didn't see anything. I slowly started moving objects one by one to find it. I grabbed a little bag that I use for my knitting needles, and flipped it over.

That's when I saw it.

This picture makes it look much smaller than it was--honest!

Eli got his first glimpse of it, and started screaming as well. He thought I'd been exaggerating at how big it was. I was terrified to try to grab it with the toilet paper, because my biggest fear is the spider crawling over the paper and onto my hand (which has happened several times over the years). Eli grabbed some cleaner from the kitchen and I sprayed it with that before grabbing it with the toilet paper.

After that, my heart racing and I couldn't stop shuddering at the thought of it. My skin felt itchy and crawly and I was so creeped out about going to sleep in my bed. Because we had had the windows open all day, I assumed the spider came in through a hole in the screen or something, and I was worried about what else had gotten in.

I don't know why spiders creep me out as much as they do, but I am SO glad Estelle found that guy! I can't imagine if it had crawled onto my clothes or something for me to find later.

I was SO sore when I woke up yesterday--a delayed soreness from the long walk on Saturday. The center of each butt cheek was the most sore spot, which I thought was kind of funny. Also, my calves were pretty sore, as were my inner thighs. I did tell Andrea that I would meet her for a walk yesterday morning at the State Park, though, so even though I was sore, I went for a walk with her.

I'm glad I went, because by the end of the three miles we walked, I was feeling much looser and not so sore. I need to keep that in mind--even though I may not want to move when I'm sore, it actually helps me to feel better. It was absolutely gorgeous outside, too!

I always feel happy when I see cardinals, and I happened to see probably about seven or eight of them while we were walking--usually, I'm lucky to see one. I tried several times to get my one-second video of a cardinal, but I was never able to get close enough.

On the way home from the park, I stopped at Kroger to buy a ham and some stuff for side dishes. I'd never bought a ham in my life, but Jerry specifically requested a ham dinner, and I thought it would be fun to make something different. I procrastinated buying the ham last week, but I'm SO glad that I did--because we had our dinner the day after Easter, the ham was $20 instead of $40! I love finding good manager's specials, and this one was awesome.

I made ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, and rolls--very simple, but for just the four of us, it was plenty. My kids said they had never had ham before (they've had deli ham, and the cubed ham in split pea soup, but never slices of ham for a meal). When I thought about it, I realized that was probably true! So, I was glad they got to try something new. I'm not a big ham person, so I only ate a few bites of it. Jerry loved it, and was thrilled that he now has about seven more pounds of ham to eat this week, hahaha.

After dinner, the kids wanted to play board games, so we started with Sequence. I forgot how fun that game is! Jerry and I played on a team versus the kids, and surprisingly, they beat us on the first round. We won the second one. After that, we played Scattergories. I don't know if it's because of my new medication or just because it was a really good day, but I felt so happy the whole afternoon. We had some music playing, and the windows open, and the kids were in good moods as well.

Overall, it was a very nice weekend! The kids are on spring break all this week. We don't have much planned, but I'm grateful that we've had amazing weather, so we've been outside quite a bit!

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