Easter Tuesday

I decided to declare today Easter Tuesday since this is the day I chose to write about our Easter weekend.

While we were on the cruise,

(Anyone remember I went on a cruise?) (ha ha) (I have one more post to write and wrap it all up... don't worry I'll get it done!)

Where was I?

Oh yea, we were on the cruise ship...

While still on the cruise, my mom asked what we were doing for Easter and invited us to come spend the weekend with them. Hubby and I talked it over and decided it sounded like a great way to celebrate Easter.

So Friday night we packed up the car and headed to my parents' house about 3 hours away.

We had an enjoyable weekend that started with some yummy appetizers and some basketball watching.

As I walked up the stairs to get ready for bed I got to see the newly remodeled bathroom. I walked in and looked around (I liked it!) and walked back out in the hall and asked my mom, "Did they move the door?" It was moved probably only 10-12 inches, but I sure could tell. It helped the layout of the bathroom quite a bit. When I was showering the next morning, I kept looking around me because it was so different. (I was eleven years old when we moved into that house.)

Saturday we mostly sat around and talked. I guess we didn't run out of things to talk about even though we had just spent a whole week together. :)

In the afternoon, we all trekked across the street to visit with the neighbors. They are the parents of my childhood friend who died about a year and a half ago. We had a good visit with them. I noticed they had several pictures of my friend around the house. Made me really miss her. Her sweet mom got tears in her eyes when I hugged her goodbye. Made me cry too. I'm really glad we popped over for a visit.

Back at my parents' house, I went searching through a drawer in the bookcase in the living room and found a treasure trove of cassette tapes. For many of the junior high and high school concerts, my mom would bring along a portable cassette player, much like this:

My dear mom not only sat through all those concerts, she recorded them and then subjected herself to having to listen to them over and over at home while I insisted on listening to them repeatedly and sang along or tried to pick out my violin part. (My violin career was only three years long. Thankfully.)

In amongst those tapes was one labeled Pam, Beth, Paul and Judy Nonsense. THIS was the tape I was hunting for! I wrote a post last October about eating peanuts and the childhood memories that it invoked. One of the memories was a song with the words:

Found a peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut just now. 

Just now I found a peanut, found a peanut just know.

 

I remembered singing it into a tape player when I was 9 or 10 years old. One side of the tape is hard to hear much of anything on it, then a little of my siblings and me talking nonsense. The other side of the tape features ... ME! I had the tape player in my room and I was just talking about what clothes I was changing into, friends we had gone to visit, what was on the bulletin board in my room, who was in my Sunday school class, I sang some songs, read a couple of little books like this one:

 

and played a little plastic instrument I called a Keymonica. Mine looked a lot like this:

I laughed so hard as I listened to myself from 42ish years ago. (I told Hubby that it was my version of what our kids did with the video camera in the late 1990s.) I texted my kids to ask them if they have cassette players and told them I had a real treat for them when we visit next!

Easter morning was at the church Hubby and I were married in. I really loved singing a couple of wonderful traditional Easter hymns...especially because of the pipe organ accompaniment. Such a majestic sound to go with Christ the Lord is Risen Today.

We had a very nice Easter weekend with my parents.