1st Easter in New Zealand

Our first Easter in New Zealand was filled with happiness and sadness!
We started our Easter celebration with an egg hunt at Rechurch, a church plant in Christchurch, on Saturday. To our delight they had ordered every plastic Easter egg in New Zealand (I, Erin, had searched high and low for plastic eggs and could only find one package). The kids had a blast finding eggs everywhere as mom was jumping up and down at the thought that I could reuse these eggs for years to come!
After the egg hunt we returned home and our friends Tony and Kelsey from our MTI training (who are missionaries with the organization that planted Rechurch and are currently living in Dunedin about 4 hours south of Christchurch) came to stay the night with us. It was nice to catch up with them and hear how God is working in their lives.
Sunday the boys woke up to find their Kiwi birds (National Bird of New Zealand) instead of an Easter Basket. We had a great Easter breakfast and then headed off to church to worship our Lord and Savior who died on the cross and rose on the third day!
We returned home and had our own Egg Hunt and then enjoyed a roast lamb dinner with a student from the University.
So all of that was the happiness of Easter. The sadness came in to play when I realized how much I missed my family. Easter has always been a time that we have celebrated with family. It was hard to know that our family was so far away and that they weren't even celebrating on the same day. It is really new to be celebrating a day early and call to say Happy Easter the day after! Something to get use to!