Now that the Bunny has come and gone for 2024, let’s have a little Easter wrap up! Having three holidays – St. Patrick’s, our wedding anniversary, and Easter – in the span of two weeks was…a lot. And I mean it was a lot of the good stuff, but I definitely didn’t have the forethought of prioritizing: “well let me get pictures of packed Easter baskets with links to items 2 weeks in advance to post on my blog.” I still want to share all the fun and goodies for future reference, and we’ll keep our eye on 2025 to see if I will share in advance next time (not likely, but hey a girl can dream). So here is our Easter with a 2.5 year old toddler and 5 month old:

The week before, we had our Aunt BB and Matt come with us to visit the Easter Bunny and see some friends at the rec center! They also offer a bunch of kid friendly crafts around the holidays! In true Layla fashion, she didn’t smile in a single picture but wanted to go back and sit with the bunny three times and didn’t want to leave. We also had several cute bunny books which were perfect for Easter, but also all year round since Layla is a total bunny gal!

This year I started seeing several posts on popular mom forums like @scarymommy regarding the thought that all of the smaller holidays are starting to turn into Christmas in the sense that they’re just getting bigger and over the top; so I’ll go ahead and let you know now, it’s okay if your Easter wasn’t filled with over the top decorations, expensive baskets or hundreds of eggs in the yard to find! We didn’t use any of the “bunny kits” to make it look like the bunny hopped all over the house and the girls loved their baskets without breaking the bank or being the size of a kiddie pool. We had a few decorations, fun crafts for Layla and sweet baskets for the girls.

One new thing we added this year was a tradition from Jon’s childhood: they would put out empty Easter baskets the night before, and then while everyone was sleeping the Bunny would fill the baskets and hide them for the kids to find in the morning! We were super excited to bring that to life for the girls this year and continue that tradition for Jon. We had a few bunny books and blankets that Layla will love all year round! Layla had zero interest in an egg hunt in the yard, so I stashed that candy away and she was none the wiser.

We’re not anti-candy by any means, but if she’s not super into it, we don’t feel the need to sugar her up, especially when we had lots of other fun treats with family visiting for the holiday! This showed through in the Easter baskets as well, where we focused on non-candy items, but added in a custom “peeps” cookie for each girl with her name on it from the Babywearing Baker, Maria Short. Below find a breakdown of the baskets and a few links for where to find them:

• Festive bunny ears
• Bubbles! A fan favorite
• Matching sister outfits
• A carrot baby teether
• “My First Easter” bib
• Sheep finger puppets
• Egg shaped sidewalk chalk
• An Easter themed mini baking tool set

Even though this post won’t help anyone pack their easter baskets for 2024, I still want to share it now in hopes that someone out there can pull it out of the archives for the 2025 Easter season!