Easter Morning

Here we are, ready to go to church at 6:30 a.m.! Yes, we made it to the sunrise service here at First English. The kids kept asking, "Why are we going to church at night? Why is it still dark?"
We had all their clothes carefully laid out for them, and Michael even slept in his dress pants with a white onesie just in case we were running behind. It worked pretty well, though.
Dan did have a surprise--it turns out that First English ALWAYS has communion on Easter Sunday. Dan, however, did not know this and wrote out a liturgy (printed in the bulletin instead of from the hymnal) that did not include communion. While the choir was singing at the beginning of the service, the altar guild ladies put everything back that they had taken down on Maundy Thursday, like the candles, banners, AND the communion ware. Dan asked about it, and found out that he would be improvising a communion service somewhere in the middle of the one he had planned! It worked out well, and he was only a little flustered. Everyone else knew what to do.
We enjoyed the breakfast of pancakes after church at First English, then headed up to Zion to try to catch their breakfast before the later service. At that one, a high school girl from the church and I played violin duets for the prelude and offering. It was a lot of fun! The kids crawled around under the pews in the balcony for most of the service (we were the only ones up there) because they had had enough behaving for one day. They all did pretty well, considering we had to wake them up 2 hours earlier than usual and they had already made it through one church service and breakfast.
All in all, it was a joyful celebration of Christ's resurrection!