We Love Nashville in the Springtime!

Thank goodness for spring!  We have taken advantage of our beautiful weather over the last few weeks to play outside all over town at some of our favorite springtime spots...

 

The Nashville Zoo.  Not only are there animals to watch, but there is also the most amazing playground ever.  Anywhere.  Seriously.  Ev adores this place (as does her mama).

The Downtown Farmer's Market.  It seems there are farmer's markets on most street corners in Nashville these days, but the original is downtown and always a fun spot to visit, whether you buy anything or not.  We visited a couple weeks ago in search of some plants to brighten up our deck, and while Honey and Mama were shopping, Evelyn investigated a fountain display.  

Cheekwood.  Beautiful gardens, ample steps to climb and paths to explore, wide open spaces to occupy...what more does a girl need?

 Outdoor festivals.  Nashville kicks off its festival season in April, and we enjoyed a new one this past weekend:  Endada, an arts festival at MBA.  MBA is Dave's high-school alma mater, and though we were skeptical of what this thing might look like, we loved it.  Arts and crafts for sale by students and adults alike, face-painting and chalk-drawing and castle-bouncing and balloon-animal-ing for the kids, theater performances, short film exhibitions, two stages with bands playing all day, and food trucks.  Free and freaking awesome!  Note our young rocker in the picture above.  One of Dave's students is the youth on electric guitar in the background, and he played "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for Evelyn while warming up.  Nashvegas friends, check this out next year if you missed it.

Our deck.  We live in a condo and thus have no yard, so when we stay home and play outside, we choose from either the asphalt parking lot or the deck.  Our deck is nice and shady in the afternoons, so it is the perfect place for a little water fun.  (Since this picture, our pink pool has taken up residence at Carter's house, and his backyard is now one of new favorite destinations for swimming:))  Yay for spring!

More Easter Festivities

We definitely spent some time Easter-egg-hunting.  But we also did some other fun things over the weekends leading up to Easter and on Easter Sunday itself:

 We blew (and chased) bubbles...

...and inspected Grammie's flowers.

We dined with cousins (and aunts and uncles and grandparents)...

...and hunted for eggs with cousins...

...and posed for pictures with cousins.

We learned about Easter baskets...

...and discovered M&Ms.

We hope your Easter celebrations were as joyful as ours!

The Art of the Hunt

Evelyn fine-tuned her skills at several Easter egg hunts this year; her strategy thus far has been to pick up a single egg, shake it and crack it open, delight in whatever treat she finds inside, and then call it a day, despite her parents' urging to consider looking for other eggs.  I think that she's got this exactly right, though--if only we could always rejoice so completely in our current circumstances that we do not even think about hungering for something more!

Easter People

 I love that our church (like many churches) values the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, so that each year, mere weeks after the anticipation of Advent and the celebration of Christmas, we walk very intentionally through the season of Lent and then come out of that desert into the joy of Easter.  On the day(s) after Easter, though, I sometimes find myself feeling a little bit like you feel on the day after Christmas, despite the fact that we are Easter people who get to live every day in the truth of the resurrection!  But there it is. 

So anyways, a dear friend reminded me the other day that Wendell Berry suggested we should "practice resurrection" every day (this suggestion actually comes at the end of a long line of other helpful suggestions from ol' Wendell, so look it up and read the whole thing when you get a chance sometime).  So true, Wendell, and such an apt reminder.  Practicing resurrection is a good thing to do in the wake of Easter, don't you think?   

Speaking of being Easter people, we Berrys tried to take our job very seriously this year:

More Easter pictures to come soon!