Update: A Dolled Up Easter Giveaway!

Update: This giveaway is now closed!  Thanks to all who entered. Our winner was Laura Day!  She’s getting a sweet Easter shirt from Get Dolled Up for her little girl.

My kids have a problem.  We realized it right after Christmas when this came out of my daughter’s mouth, “It’s okay I didn’t get a horse, Mama.  I’ll just ask the Easter Bunny for one.”

What?!?

Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten the idea that the point of the Easter Bunny must be to function like Santa Claus (except better because Santa didn’t bring a horse).  I truly don’t know why they think this, because in the first place, we don’t talk about the EB much.  Secondly, our Easter baskets consist of about $5 worth of candy and junk toys from the Dollar Tree and that’s it.  Finally, we always talk about Christ being at the center of our Easter celebration.

Don’t we?  After that comment, I’ve had to do some hard thinking about whether or not I use this season to teach my children about the sacred, glorious, incomprehensible power of the Cross.

You know what?  I don’t.  We attend the sunrise service, we pray, we thank God, we have devotions, we’ve learned with Resurrection Eggs, but I think I keep it all a little bit too bright and shiny.  You know, it’s a fine line with children: I don’t want to show them the ugliness of the crucifixion so I can scare them into submission, but neither do I want to gloss it over with pastel colors and chevron painted eggs.  Somehow, Easter has to be brought to their level of comprehension.  I think that’s why Christmas gets more attention; it’s undoubtably easier to talk about a sweet baby being born who loves us all, than it is to talk about that same sweet baby becoming a man who died for us all.

I have a friend here in my small town who blogged recently about the same struggle.  She’s a mother, and she’s built a business on the idea that it’s fun to doll life up.  Katie will embroider your monogram on anything you can think of, and her daughter is (according to one of our mutual friends) the best dressed little girl at the church Pre-K.  But when it came time to doll up for spring, Katie didn’t just want to make a cutsie Easter shirt and leave it there.  She wanted to make a statement about faith, a gentle reminder that this season is more.

So using a little ItchtoStitch inspiration, she’s going to be offering these sweet appliques with a monogram of your choice for Easter.  I’ll be ordering baby Gus that darling wagon and talking to my girls about how we carry the cross with us wherever we go, even egg hunts.

Don’t you want to doll up your little ones with these for Easter?  Today, Katie and I have teamed up to offer my very first giveaway!  I’ve been wanting to jump on that bandwagon for awhile now, and we had even discussed a giveaway for this, but when I saw these yesterday I knew I wanted to start here.  So, pretty please, enter my giveaway, follow this randomness, shop at Get Dolled Up, and leave some comment love! a Rafflecopter giveaway//d12vno17mo87cx.cloudfront.net/embed/rafl/cptr.js