Grace Garden

What is this you say? It's a Grace Garden. (Confession: I did this completely out of legalistic guilt. I was reading a few blogs online and felt like a total slacker mom looking at all the cute Easter crafts other moms were using to prepare their children's hearts for Easter. Not the right motive, but nonetheless, it ended up being super fun and a great teaching tool! So glad we will have this tool for years to come. It's sort of like the nativity scene at Christmas...a tangible teaching tool.)

Anyway, the original idea came from Ann Voskamp's blog called A Holy Experience. Google it. Her's is different from ours, but it's where I started. I changed several things about ours to make it suited for my boys.

So how does this thing work? Well as you can see we made a tomb out of rocks and glue and a dixie cup. We made a cross out of popsicle sticks, a little pond out of a dixie cup (just for fun), put flowers for new life, wrote "Grace," "Forgiven," and "Love" on three rocks, put three tea lights for the three nights Jesus was in the tomb, and cut out a Jesus figurine out of cardstock and colored it purple because He is our King.

So tonight the purple paper Jesus will be in the garden praying. Tomorrow (Friday) we will put him on the cross and light the first candle. Tomorrow night we will put him in the tomb in a white cloth. Saturday we will light the second candle, and He will still be in the tomb. Sunday morning we will light the third candle, but wait!...the rock has been rolled away! The tomb is empty and only the white cloth is there.

The boys love our little Grace Garden already....especially the little pond... the only part that isn't spiritual. Of course.

This was SUPER easy to make, and it could be much simpler than what we did. Don't do it because you feel guilty like me :) If you like it, do it because it's a fun teaching tool for our kiddos to understand Easter is more than a bunny.

Here are some pics of the boys' Easter hunt at school.

Carter and Banks

I am not sure why I am so into humor lately, but I have a serious case of the giggles. Hence the reason this pic is my favorite of the day.

Little Bunny Coop

Carter and Whitten

Nevermind....this is my favorite. Bahahaha! All I can think is: "I'm too sexy for my shirt."