Easter and Conference with This Big Family!

Our first Easter and first General Conference in the new house!

As well as our first time all being here in a somewhat settled (rather than "in the thick of moving") state!

There was a late-night movie (Project Hail Mary). And the older kids took all the younger kids to play pickleball. There were games. An Easter egg hunt. Old Pleasant View ward friends over for dinner. Easter dinner with cousins. And a lot of lounging about listening to conference.

I love how light everything is in the new house! (I also recognize that it looks perhaps a bit too starkly white with nary a thing to be seen on the walls. But it's tricky. I tend to want everything to have some sort of meaning for us--like the Lochinvar photos, the pea-vine knobs, and my dad's back sketch, but it feels a bit daunting to first find or think up all these meaningful things, and then actually ... I don't know ... print or frame them and so on, and then also decide where to hang them! It's going to take me a minute!)

I hear plenty of arguments against having a big family. (Society, on the whole, seems mostly aghast at the very idea of numerous children.) With my later kids I experienced some of those feelings of hesitancy in announcing the news, and I fielded my share of the invariable tiresome comments. Obviously, I know firsthand the work and exhaustion of a big family. And my kids know the reality of not being able to participate in every extra-curricular activity or to have me available for every school function, etc.

On the other hand! 

This! 

This home full of people who love each other and laugh together!

I simply can't help but feel, overarching all of those arguments against a big family, something along the lines of, "Yes, but do any of you know what it means to have given our kids THIS????"

To me it seemed the most glorious thing in the world to grow up surrounded by a host of siblings who loved me and made life more entertaining. 

And it feels the most glorious thing in the world for my younger kids to have all these older siblings who they long to have around, and who they want to call or text with any bits of news, and who make a fuss over their slightest achievements, and take them places, and make their lives more fun. 

And it seems the most glorious thing in the world for my older kids to have all of these little people clambering about them and adoring them and creating a full and fun place for them to come home to.

I can't help it. I feel so grateful and kind of awed and even a bit proud of ourselves that we actually managed to create this large family!

Anyway! Enough of that. But I just felt it so much with all of them around on this Easter weekend. So many years, and so many pregnancies, and so many prayers and fears, so many completely sleepless nights with newborns and sick children, so much potty-training, so much teaching. It feels a miracle to see all ten of them here!

But. Moving on:

Kenya braids for the girls.

I did, perhaps, fall asleep a bit too often during conference. 

Weird that our family photos are starting to look full of more adults than kids!