To be honest, our "celebration" of Easter is areligious, pretty much beginning & ending with an egg hunt, maybe a chocolate bunny or three, and (if we're lucky) a fun get-together involving good food. As we have for the past several years, we happily spent it being hosted by close friends from our MIT group.
We arrived at the house surprisingly close to the time we were supposed to (a bit of a feat for this family!) and quickly divided up as we usually do: the grownups all chatting & trying to help out in the living room / dining room / kitchen while all the kids alternated between making lots of happy noise & mess downstairs in the basement or upstairs in CN's bedroom. (Punctuated every now and then with a less happy noise when her younger brother was a boy and the girls were girls, of course!)
After a while we noticed the hazy sky was rapidly changing to a threatening grey so the grownups made sure the younger generation remained indoors and we began hiding eggs for the hunt. What the plastic eggs lacked in accurate depiction of egghood they more than made up for in volume -- I lost count of how many I'd placed somewhere in the middle range of 2-digit numbers and there were several of us placing the eggs in the back, side, and front yards. Of course it started raining shortly before we finished, but it was light enough to mostly ignore (I took momentary refuge under a tall flowering bush that promptly began leaking rainwater down the back of my neck) and soon the deed was done.
We had plastic eggs placed high and placed low; tucked into dark corners and laying out in plain view; snuggled into nooks & crannies and balanced on fenceposts; in the grass and on the deck; nestled firmly into depressions and balanced carefully on rises; on the ground and tucked into bushes... In short, there were eggs pretty darn much everywhere by the time we were done. Of course, being me, I decided to experiment a little with the ol' "hide in plain sight" trick using similar shapes and colors:
The weather cleared considerably as we tried
...and then they were off!
(Note to self: You'll have a lot more photos of the egg hunt if fewer eggs are placed where the kids don't either need help to reach them or adult supervision to avoid injury while gathering them. Oops.)The rules of the hunt were simple: don't do any major damage to the house, the yard, yourselves, or each other, and have a good time; the result was that everybody had fun and all the kids had an impressive haul. We discovered that residual rainwater had leaked into a few eggs to spoil the candy inside, so there was careful sorting, opening, and checking of every. single. plastic. egg. to make sure no one ended up with a mouthful of damp & potentially dirty candy. (Dude, they all still ended up with a few thousand calories' worth each, don't sweat it!)
Mom had also put together Easter baskets for all the kids that included giant stuffed bunnies. The kids were thrilled with their new companions and Miri was happy to formally present them to everyone.... plus it afforded everyone quite a photo op!
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| (Yes, I know they're facing the wrong way. I forgot to ask if I could post the photo showing their faces!) |
As good as the food was, the desserts (yes, plural) were the highlight of the meal. The stars of the show were a couple of home-baked Easter cakes that were just as pretty on the inside as on the outside, and delicious to boot!
The kids, well-fueled with sugar and carbs, returned to their happy noisemaking while the adults all tried fending off a bout of post-meal sleepiness with more good conversation (and a little additional noshing) in the living room, but after a while the adults began waking up and the kids began coming down from their sugar high and it was time to go home.
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