Open Egg Season

It turned out to be quite timely that Zeke learned to identify and say 'egg' about a month ago because he went to three Easter egg hunts this year.

Friday we went to an egg hunt put on by Draper and Dynna and their company. Aaron and I had never been to a community-type egg hunt before, and we discovered it is a short, chaotic event. Kids running around everywhere, snatching up as many eggs as possible. It was Zeke's very first egg hunt, so we were trying to explain the theory to him: 'Do you see that egg? Go pick it up and put it in your sack.' We'd just get to the seeing the egg part when the egg would disappear into some other kid's sack.

Aaron re-hid one of the eggs we tried to find initially so Zeke could really truly find it, pick it up, and claim it for his sack. The kids were still on the hunt, so Aaron did have to turn one little girl away with 'Sorry, this egg belongs to someone else. It actually has already been found.' We also had several other adults with us who volunteered to stand guard over other eggs and candy to keep them safe until Zeke could find them in his own time.

Saturday we hunted small foil-wrapped chocolate eggs at Grandma and Grandpa Carlile's. There was zero competition, so Zeke hunted eggs for a while and then turned to dumping out and re-loading the basket of eggs he had already found.

Sunday Zeke hunted hard-boiled eggs at Grandma and Grandpa Loertscher's with all of his cousins. By now Zeke had the egg-hunting skills down. Except for the fact that he was less than interested in the hunt at the moment.

Again we played the dump the basket game. Good thing eggs were involved in both breakfast and dinner.

The egg collections pretty much stacked up according to age: Zeke's three-year-old cousins found about 14 each, Zeke found six eggs and a plastic turtle, and the nine-month-old crawler found one egg of her very own.