Spring Fling

Of all the holidays, Easter is the one that I have the most fun with.  We take our kids to a community egg hunt or two where it is a free for all.  Plastic eggs filled with sweets are just lying on the ground.  When they get the signal, the kids run around grabbing as many eggs as they can before another kid does.  There are tons of kids at these events, getting tons of candy and tons of happy.

Then we have an egg hunt at home that is just for our family.  We hide our eggs and vary the difficulty by age.  Each kid has two colors assigned to them and they can only collect eggs with their colors.  Each kid also has the same number of eggs to hunt so all is fair and square.  …except for the golden egg with cold hard cash in it.  There is only one of those, and finders keepers.

Since the kids have already gotten more sugar than I would ever wish for them to have at the free hunts, our family hunt is a sugar-free event.  Instead of sweets, I fill the eggs with little toys and trinkets I have picked especially for them.  I enjoy the challenge of shopping for fun things to put in their eggs.  I try to be as creative as possible for as cheap as possible.

Last year while shopping, I spotted some ceramic eggs.  They were pots that were pre-packaged with dirt and seeds, just add water.  Oooh, they were so cute!  And I was so tempted!  But $3 per egg filling is my limit and these were $5 and change.  It gave me the idea to use seed packets as an egg-filler though.  Those are under $1.  I picked out the perfect one for each kid; cucumber seeds for Ethan, sugar snap pea seeds for Daniel and wild flower seeds for Asha.

As expected, the kids were super excited when they found seed packets in one of their eggs.  They wanted to plant them immediately.  I told them to wait and finish up what we were doing and then we would head out to the back yard to plant them.

Asha did not hear this because she had already ripped open her packet and, in a flash, was twirling around in the middle of our front yard, squealing with delight, as she flung the seeds across our lawn.  I looked at her in stunned silence, my mouth agape, as she excitedly asked, "When do you think they'll bloom?"