A Life Changing Easter

Easter Sunday was absolutely wonderful. 

We started the day out with our annual Easter egg hunt [yes the Easter bunny still stops by our house - but we get coins instead of candy.]

Then my mom and I headed off to Church for a wonderful service where we had our flower communion [where everyone brings flowers from their garden, the children bring all the flowers to the front and get told how flowers come back from the dead each year and then each of the kids takes a flower and goes off to Religious Education and at the end of the service everyone is handed a flower as they walk out the door] and the beautiful playground that's been in planning for the last 18 months suddenly appeared for Easter Sunday and all the kids got to go play!

Following church, the whole family went on a drive to St. Helena in Napa Valley.

We passed the massive Greystone Culinary Institute of America [for any of you who've watched Top Chef, this is where they went and filmed in Napa].

We walked around in downtown St. Helena and passed this chocolate shop that had created these really fun artsy eggs out of pure chocolate.

[And just because I love butterflies so much and thought this wreath was magnificent...]

So the reason for going to St. Helena for the day was to meet "relatives" we'd never met before.

My dad's sister had her son when she was in high school. The father [who was definitely the father] denied that the kid was ever his and then went off to war and died soon after. My dad's sister then died of lung cancer in November of 2007.

The father's sister recently contacted my dad saying she'd been trying get ahold of my cousin for over a decade and was doing really poorly with cancer and wanted to meet my cousin before [in the case that] she died.

So for the past few months my dad, my cousin and "Aunt Mimi" have been emailing back and forth. 

Finally, last weekend my cousin and Mimi got the chance to meet. 

My family got the chance to meet Mimi and her husband Bob on Easter.

It really was an incredible day.