On Easter, and Being Lazy.

+Clearly, I haven't been updating this as often as I intended when I started out. I plead an enormous backup of laundry resulting from the trip, and the stress of trying to plan Tristin's Baptism and Birthday parties while trying to find work and a daycare. More on all of those things in their own time. First, Easter!

Tristin's first Easter was fantastic. I joined about 25 of my closest family members in our traditional dinner on Good Friday. Every year, since my dad and his sibs were kids, our family has gone to the Old Spaghetti factory downtown for Good Friday dinner. This tradition began when my grandfather won a family dinner gift certificate from some raffle or something. (Joke was on the restaurant; my grandparents had ten kids!) Anyways, every year thereafter, Grandpa Bus took his family out for dinner. And, despite his having passed away a few years ago, many of us continue the tradition - in fact, any of us who are in town will generally come. We make the reservations shortly after Christmas. I'm pretty sure that the manager of the restaurant actually has us in the training manual. And this year was awesome, as usual - Tristin was passed from table to table, meaning that I got to eat, and he got to meet some of his out-of-town cousins, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, inlaws and outlaws! What fun!

Then, on Sunday, we went to Easter Mass (which, I might add, I was highly impressed with, considering the logistics of having some 350 people attend a Mass in a chapel that doesn't usually see more than 100 and can only seat about 60 on a regular Sunday; Mass didn't even last longer than usual!), followed by a much-needed nap and then off to dinner at my parents' house, where Wess joined us for the first time in recorded history for Easter dinner. Again, about 30 of my closest family members joined us - and we kicked things off with the annual 30-and-under Easter Egg hunt. I lost, miserably, but felt good about it since I shelled out some of my findings to cousins whose shoes had been stolen! Man, we're a cutthroat bunch when it comes to chocolate! Dinner was fantastic - a potluck which yielded fantastical results (though not NEARLY enough potatoes for an Irish family get-together; the taters were gone before half the people had served themselves dinner!), and hanging out with the fam afterwards is always wonderful. It's funny, Easter is actually more of a family thing in my family than Christmas, even; I think it's because at Christmas we tend to divide into our sub-families of parents and sibs, while Easter is kind of a free-for-all with all the cousins, grandparents, and everyone in between.

At any rate, all in all it was a fantastic day, and I'm so glad that Wess (who is notoriously shy about coming to family gatherings larger than 6) came and enjoyed himself!