Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday was a very busy day! Mary woke me up at six o'clock, as usual, and I was on my feet working almost all day till midnight. (And Chris did many house projects that day, as well as taking John with him on some errands, which was great.) First I baked a quadruple recipe of Cinnamon Supper Cake, making one cake for our Easter and two for our parish, which is serving the poor and homeless an Easter meal. Unfortunately, I forgot to put the cinnamon in the cinnamon cake. (The recipe doesn't call for cinnamon except in the sugar on top, but it tastes much more delicious with cinnamon inside the batter.) Second, when I reached for the previously forgotten cinnamon to put it in the sugar topping, I realized I was out of it and Chris had to save me by dashing to the store to buy more. Third, I think I missed the deadline to get the cakes to the church! I swore I had understood that we should bring the food on Sunday morning for assembly and serving later. But now I am under the impression that it was due at church on Saturday (which makes more sense). Chris is at Mass now and will figure it out for me.

Then I tried to bake hot cross buns, in an effort to be traditional. My dough did not rise, so I warmed the oven and put the dough in there, with the oven off and door open a crack, which did cause the dough to double. Then I punched down the dough, formed into rolls, and set it in the warmed oven to rise again. They didn't rise again and, after baking, were dense and truly inedible (despite my husband claiming differently). I was very frustrated and reminded of my failed Portuguese sweet bread (raw in the middle) from two Easters before.

Then it was time to dye Easter eggs. The whole debacle was reminiscent of trying to decorate cookies with John at Christmas. He's too young to do it carefully and is almost definitely going to knock over the pots of food coloring, but he's extremely eager to help. All in all, it wasn't very fun and I was disappointed. It was a lot easier to decorate eggs with John when he was four months old.
John thought the egg dipper was for blowing bubbles:

Mary slept on my back for most of the time:

At five months old today, she still has blue eyes. I checked and John's eyes were still blue at five months, but much darker. (In an interesting comparison, while looking at old blog posts, I saw that John learned to roll over back to front at five months old, while Mary has been doing it easily for a month.)

We ate a simple dinner and were planning to attempt Easter vigil Mass as a family, with hopes that John would simply fall asleep in Daddy's arms. But during dinner, we changed our minds as John had had a particularly bad day full of meltdowns and unhappiness. Mary and I ended up going to the Mass (8:00-10:15 p.m.), which was beautiful, but I was literally falling asleep in my seat the whole time. The only thing that kept me from falling asleep all the way, was that this liturgy requires frequent standing up and sitting down.

I got home and had some more Easter preparations to finish before being able to go to sleep at midnight.