Monday, April 5, 2010

The Easter Egg Hunt: Has Mommy Gone Crazy?!?!

Paul spent the last two days acting like I had completely lost my mind. The word “psychotic” was tossed around quite a bit. And why did my loving husband think that I’d gone crazy?

All because of one teensy weensy little egg hunt.

You see, Sadie and I have been practicing for this years city-wide egg hunt. A week or so ago, when the weather was beautiful, we were out on the back lawn at Nani and Grumpa’s house hiding eggs and finding them. Then when we came inside I filled the plastic eggs with her toys and she learned that eggs can have toys inside of them (we’re still too tiny for candy!).

I figured that it might take Sadie a little while to figure out the whole idea of picking up an egg and putting it in the basket and Sadie had fun giggling out in the yard looking for eggs.

Paul, on the other hand, suspected that I had ulterior motives. He imagined that I was obsessing over the three plastic eggs that had come up in conversation from time to time. At our city’s egg hunt most of the eggs are real, but there are three plastic eggs in each age group that are prize eggs. One is gold, one is silver and one is bronze (actually the last one is usually pink, but they call it “bronze”). Last year Sadie “found” the silver egg and won a giant basket full of toys (I should probably mention that at eight months old she did have a little help from Mommy who finally had to pick up the silver egg after Sadie became enamored with shoving a teal green dyed egg into her mouth that was nearby). He knows that I can be a teensy bit competitive and began shaking his head every time the egg hunt came up.

Two days ago, when it was 39 degrees and pouring rain Paul said “we aren’t going to the egg hunt if it’s like this.” My automatic response (he’d already been calling me crazy at that point) was: “She’ll have fun! She loves puddle stomping! We’ll bundle her up in layers of pants and sweatshirts and jackets and I’ll carry and umbrella. She won’t even get wet! Besides, if it’s this cold and rainy we might be the only ones there! We’ll have a chance at the gold egg!” More head shaking followed this comment, along with some muttering about my sanity.

Yesterday rolled around and Grumpa was called out to work chain control (to give you some idea of the weather). In our little town it rained most of the day, occasionally spitting snow that didn’t stick, before going back to a torrential downpour.

We went to Mass, came home and had breakfast, had our own indoor egg hunt with plastic eggs, watched The Little Mermaid while Daddy took a nap to get used to being back on nights, and then got dressed to go out and brave the cold.

When we got the park there were no other kids there. With five minutes left to go, brave families started to trickle over and I started to attempt to guess how many of the little ones were in Sadie’s age group. I’d already spotted the silver and bronze eggs from the perimeter, although I should note that I was not one of the parents that actually walked out onto the restricted egg field to take a look around (and wouldn’t you know one of those parents got the golden egg!).

Finally they said go and I directed Sadie towards the silver egg. We made it and for a second year in a row she went for the pretty blue egg next to the silver egg. After some convincing and coaxing (and Mommy picking up the silver egg and handing it to her) the silver egg was in our basket. Then we walked around while Sadie went crazy picking up eggs. She suddenly knew what she was supposed to do. Eighteen eggs later we picked her up and headed for the reward table. The five to ten children in the age group had done their best and each had full baskets, but there were still plenty of eggs all over the place.

The funny thing was that everyone agreed that the egg hunt was more fun this year out in the rain. Sadie and all the kids that were there, had a blast! And after watching the other parents actually walk out onto the clearly marked off field to try to find the prize eggs, Paul no longer thinks I’m all that crazy.

2 comments:

  1. Awww.. My inlaws did prize eggs too. Kalila got both the 3rd and 1st prize ones (there were multiple in each 3 categories though) but there was no way to know until we opened them up.

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  2. Our kids play egg hunts until mom finally puts them away - oh, around June maybe... One year our oldest hid the baskets & made up a treasure hunt for them with clues scattered all thru the house.

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