Easter report

My goal this Easter was to focus more on the meaning of the holiday and enfuse our daily lives this past week with scriptures, stories and testimony. I'm happy to report that we were able to get through it and Ella loved it and wanted even more of it. The great thing about the restored gospel is that we've been taught to read, celebrate , and re-live these events and their teachings every day, not only at Easter time or during the holidays in general. We wrapped up the festivities with a nice yummy Easter lunch before church and cake afterwards. I loved our week-long, simple and stress-free celebration as it allowed us to really think and talk about the Savior's sacrifice.

Egg-shaped carrot cake. It was delish!



For my nursery class I did this Easter egg hunt where for each of the main events of the week (I chose seven that could more easily be explained to the children), I reserved one egg. I numbered the eggs and in each egg

I placed a little artifact corresponding to that day's event (i.e. Jesus was betrayed for 30 silver coins: I put three dimes in that egg, a piece of white cloth for His burial, etc.) First I hid the eggs and had the children find them. They were not even disappointed not to find candy in it! They're awesome! I had them find all the eggs and then we opened them together in order, 1 through 12 while telling the story that went with each of the artifacts. Really neat idea I found on the web on a lds site. Then we did a craft, had them decorate their own eggs. Fun!



And this morning I was up bright and early (again)... had an appointment for my Cardio fit point test. My fitness has increased significantly over the past 7 months but there's still work to do, no doubt. I'll be starting to focus more on increasing my aerobic base (zone 2 which is the fat burning zone.) It's interesting how you have to work things from so many different angles, increase overall fitness, then focus on specific aspects of it which will require different types of exercises. For example, until now my aerobic exercises were mainly focused on interval training (intense sprints into top of zone 3 and AT for 30-60 secs followed by 2-3 mins of recovery in zones 2 and 1) which did me a lot of good as it increased my overall fitness and heart rate recovery which is above 40 (outstanding.) Now in order to help my body burn more fat at rest or while doing lower intensity exercises (zone 2), I will switch my focus on steady paced aerobics, no sprints or bursts. Anyhow, I think it's fascinating!

Otherwise the excitment is raising over here as we're getting ready for our big trip to India. We started packing and are looking forward to flying out on Friday afternoon. As for my workouts, luckily my sister-in-law has a gym membership and we'll be going together. Yeay! The tough part will be staying away from the yummy foods and desserts my mom-in-law will be making....!