Liv didn't get to play with the real eggs this year. Here she is with her Easter eggs.

At Easter we play an Easter Egg game. In this traditional game each person picks their egg and then the first person hits his egg against another person's egg. The winner (unbroken egg) hits his egg against another person's egg until there is only one person with an unbroken egg. That person is said to have good luck. Some tricks are to try and convince the next person to let you hit your pointy side against their bigger side, to try and hit on the side of the other person's egg as you are coming down, and on and on and on. There is no real trick that works except for painting your red egg with red nail polish. That works :). Hehehe, it is also cheating. My mom painted our red eggs with red nail polish one year and we beat all our cousins. Hahahaha. They were not really thrilled when they found out about the nail polish. Oh well, it was a really fun Easter for me and Georgie :).

Here the boys are with the egg they each picked.

Usually the game isn't played correctly because kids do not like to lose. Imagine that. So lots of eggs end up being broken by each kid. The rule is if you lose, you need to eat your egg. If you don't eat your eggs you can't play anymore.

The Easter bunny brought the boys Easter Lillies and Easter M&M's this year. The kids were really excited about both. We spent the morning dying our Easter eggs and then we went to Legal Seafood for lunch. Here are some individual shots.

So right now I am sitting on Jack's bed watching Tor play on the computer. He is playing Nick Jr., games. Barkley is sitting next to me because she loves me and is worried about me. Brian came up and asked if I was doing ok because today is my Mom's name day and I burst into tears. That is why I am not so into Greek Easter this year. My mom's name was Anastasia which means resurrection in Greek. Easter is her name day. Every Holy Saturday night we would go to church and at the stroke of midnight we would try to be the first one to wish mom a happy name day. Name days are just as important, if not more important, than birthdays. For instance my grandparents didn't know their birthdays when they immigrated to the US, they only knew their name days.

Last year Greek Easter was only 11 days after my Mom died. I guess I was still on shock. Plus I was very pregnant with Liv and my doctor advised me not to get myself too upset because it wouldn't be good for the baby. I sort of laughed at him when he told me that.

This must be why it is hitting me really hard this year and why I didn't really get excited about Greek Easter/my mom's name day, this year.

I called my Dad this morning to wish him a Xristos Anesti. He just called me back. He was at the cemetery visiting mom. We could barely talk on the phone we were both crying so much. Man, I didn't want her to die. She was my Mom. We didn't get a long very well but gosh she was my Mom. Ugh. Does this ever get better? Losing a parent is more difficult than I ever thought it would be.

Xristos Anesti! Today is Greek Easter. Yay.

I didn't dye my red eggs this year or make Tsoureki. I am not sure why. Just didn't. Traditionally we dye our eggs red on Thursday because that is the day Christ was crucified and the red represents his blood. On Good Friday we make the bread and then we either eat it at midnight last night (when He rises) or first thing in the morning today. Maybe I will make some later.

We are going to have Lamb and Greek Potatoes later. Works out well this year because Brian can't chew meat anyway yet. He hates lamb so I would have had to make something else. Instead he can just have soup. The kids and I LOVE lamb :).

Anyway, Happy Easter to all my Greek family and Friends!

This is what I was doing a year ago today, and this is what I looked like.

This was the result. What a beautiful result :).

Let me start off by saying I am a big fan of The New York Post. It shows up in a red bag on my driveway every morning and has for the past 10.5 years, the same amount of time I have lived in NY. When I go on vacation I even buy copies of it because I donate the ones I am missing at home to the schools. BUT, nypost.com SUCKS and the following is an example of why.

I read a column by Phil Mushnick in Sunday's New York Post that I liked. It was about President Obama's Special Olympics "joke" on Jay Leno. I put the hard copy on Brian's desk to read and then this morning I searched for it to link to it on Facebook and Twitter and to send around to my friends. Well guess what? Search on NYPost.com is broken.

First I went to the site and used their Yahoo powered search box. I typed in Phil Mushnick and chose to do a "recent" search and got back 2 results. Neither result was the right article. Then I tried the archives. No luck. To make matters worse, when you go to do another search the search box has a giant Yahoo logo in the background and you can't read what you are typing. How idiotic. Then I tried the full web search option. Not there either. There were, however, many articles on other sites on how Phil Mushnick sucks.

Okay so then I clicked on the Sports tab and clicked on the Columnists link. I got a page that listed just the most recent column from each columnist. Another dead end. His name and picture aren't clickable and the only link "more" takes you to his most recent column and gives you no way to read any of his other columns.

Then I gave up on Yahoo and the nypost.com and went to Google. I searched under "Phil Mushnick," under "Phil Mushnick, Special Olympics" and anything else I could think of and again nothing. I found plenty of links to people complaining about the article I was searching for but even they didn't link to it because they probably could not find it either.

This isn't the first time nypost.com has driven me crazy trying to find an article that I have sitting in front of me in the newspaper.

As awful as this was, finding something from Page Six online is even worse. Page Six was the original gossip column. No wonder TMZ is killing them. TMZ *is* searchable.

UPDATE: When I was retracing my steps I found a drop down menu that didn't appear for me the first time I clicked the columnists link. The menu only appears if you wait a second or two with your mouse over the word columnist. Who would do that? The drop down menu lists each columnist and if you click their name, you get a list of all their articles. Unreal how hidden this is.

So here is the article but I am so pissed off that it took me a while this morning and then again this evening to find it that I am not linking to it anywhere except here :). Not Twitter, not Facebook and not in email. What a terrible experience.

UPDATE 2: Sometimes when the columnists drop down appears, it has black text on a black background. WTF? I am using Firefox on Windows. It isn't like I am using an obscure Mac browser. Ugh.

Wow, Liv is going to be one in a little over a week. Amazing. She is such a good baby. We are all so lucky to have her in our lives. We almost didn't. She was just meant to be.

For Jack's 1st birthday we had a big party at our old house. For Tor's 1st birthday Grandma Jackie and Grandpa Noel came over and we all went to Yankee Stadium and they wished him a happy birthday on the big screen. When we came home we had cupcakes.

This year we decided to have a small 1st birthday party here at the house on her birthday with Jack and Tor's close friends and their younger siblings. Of course she will have a giraffe themed party :). It should be lots of fun.