Pesach

First off, I just want to clarify,
As most of you know, we aren't Jewish, so it might seem kind of strange that we keep so many of the Jewish traditions. Well it shouldn't be. The Jewish traditions are so beautiful and meaningful and are centered around God and the family, can it get much better than that? I am a follower of Yeshua (Jesus) and just in case you didn't remember, Yeshua was a Jew and kept these same customs. We SO support Israel and know that God has not abandoned his people or the land of Israel itself and we want to do our part in keeping these traditions alive and also to raise awareness to other Christians the importance of honoring Israel and its people.
So basically we celebrate these things to honor our own Jewish roots, as in the Jewish roots of our faith. If you still think it's strange, well sorry, I probably think something's strange about you too.

So obviously since we aren't Jewish, we don't follow all the rules to a T, case in point, my mom made Challah last night :) (during passover you don't eat anything with yeast in it), also the fact that we celebrated Pesach (Passover) last night instead of Saturday.

We have a joke around our house that no matter when a feast starts, we always celebrate it on Shabbat. It's just easier that way, because we are all so accustomed to getting together on that night.

So anyways, the entire evening is a lot of fun and can take hours to go through. We did an abbreviated one, but it still took awhile.
The group

It starts off with one of the kids asking a question:


And then the lighting of the candles


Then starts the evening. It is really intricate and I don't want to go into it all here, but if you are interested in reading more about Passover and the Seder that we did last night, you can go HERE

Here we are eating our Matzah Ball soup


Jodie and Sophie



Brad about to eat the Karpis (you dip it in salt water)


The Seder plate


Dad about to hide the Matzah


My cutie


Kid's table


Me showcasing some Matzah. During Passover you don't eat anything with leven in it. And boy, in Israel, (particularly Jerusalem), they are so serious about it. During times I've spent Passover in Jerusalem, I've eaten hot dogs with Matzah, sandwhiches, hamburgers, pizza, it was my breakfast toast... you eat it with everything! And you can't even buy beer in some places because beer has yeast in it. No pasta... that was a tough one for me. By the end of passover, all you want is a nice hunk of bread to knaw on.


My niece Ashlyn eating the horse radish


My daughter was bored during the Seder, so proceeded to take all the magnets in reach off the fridge and bring them to me


And daddy put them on his forehead, because, what else are you suposed to do with them!


One of the things is that you are suposed to lounge, so this is Christina lounging


And Jon and I lounging-- Jon has issues


Tiffani was master of the lamb shank


Here are the kids dancing to the song Dayaynu- note that my daughter gets so excited dancing that she has to like do a gymnastic move. She has never done that before, it was so funny! She pulled a Kadyn.


Ashlyn got the camera and so took some pics:








My dear friend Abby and I


My niece Maddy found the matzah that was hidden so she won $2. But then we gave Ash and Kade $1 just because they are cool and got 2nd and 3rd place

The Matzah Winner


2nd place


3rd place


Lyric and I, (you can tell I was "celebrating" by this point, hey it's tradition to drink a lot of wine!)


So as you can see, last night was super fun! Though I did wake up with a terrible headache!

Now to leave you with the traditional ending of a passover seder


Love to all!

What to do???

Have you ever been faced with the question right after Passover... what do I do with all this leftover Matza.
One year we decided to have a Matza eating contest and see how many sheets of matza you could eat with only one glass of water... but if that doesn't sound fun to you, here are a few more options

Amazing!

My day has been sooooo good! I really needed a day like this...

We woke up and ate leftover Challah with strawberry jelly. Then we got our cute buns out of the house and headed to Dallas to go to the zoo! It was a lot of fun and Lyric loved to see all the animals. She was ooh'ing and awwing over them. Of course she only cared about them when they moved though. She could care less about the sleeping animals :) We walked up to the monkey area and these two monkeys were playing tag with eachother and going crazy. She loved it!

I took some pictures with my mom's camera, but I don't have the sync cord with me, so I'll have to post them later. But anyways, we got there a little after 10am, and Lyric ended up falling asleep in the stroller around 1:30, so that's when we decided to leave. We decided since we were in Dallas, we needed to go visit Ryan who was working at Uptown Pub... I mean, what's the big deal, a baby in a bar! :)
Then we went and saw Tiffani at their new house. They haven't moved in yet, they are still renting it out to the lady who they bought it from (long story), but Tiff was doing yard work, and we were able to see their super cute house! I'm so excited for them. I really liked it! I can just imagine little kid birthday parties in the backyard :)

Then we came home and everyone napped, but I couldn't fall asleep, so I just caught up on my tivo'd shows.

Then we decided to make fajitas. Jon suggested we move our little kitchenette table onto our back porch so we could eat outside. It was so much fun! Jon grilled the fajita meat on the grill and Lyric and I danced to John Mayer and then we ate outside together (I have pics of that too).

Then here's the kicker. I started cleaning up the kitchen and maybe I was just fed up with my dirty house, maybe it was the malibu and diet coke I had with dinner, but Jon and i went on a cleaning rampage. We cleaned the entire house, I scrubbed the bathrooms, cleaned Lyric's room, dusted and cleaned out from under the crib (which can always be scary, but also always lead to a discovery of more passys.) I went through her clothes and pulled out the ones that were too small. Then went through the box of clothes I thought were too big and of course most of them can fit her now. So she has a bunch of new clothes, a lot from her family in Belgium that now fits and a lot that were Saeler's. So I can't wait for her to start wearing them. Heck she'll be wearing some tomorrow at church!
So the bathrooms are clean, floors swept and mopped, rugs vaccuumed, everything dusted, I put up ALL of the laundry that I have been avoiding dealing with for the last week. Everything is just clean!
Well except my bedroom didn't really get cleaned (though it is all picked up), just the master bath, but we are going to work on it tomorrow. We are going to clean out the closet/dresser and get rid of shoes and clothes we never wear. That's just too big of a task for tonight after we've done so much work already tonight.

Speaking of tonight, tonight is the first night of Pesach (Passover). This is the first night in a long time we aren't celebrating as a family. Mainly because my family is pretty fragmented right now. The Watkins are on vacation and Landon and Holly are on their honeymoon. It's still a little sad though. Pesach always brings back great memories. When we first started celebrating it as a family, all of us kids would laugh at all the traditions and my mom would get so mad at us. Obviously as we got older, we really embraced it and it's so much fun now, but I still remember the first time we decided to honor our Jewish roots and celebrate Passover... good times! :)

Well this blog is pretty boring because I don't have pictures, so I'm going to end it now.

Hach Sameach!!!