Yesterday the egg hunt was left to me. We gave up all pretense of the Easter Bunny doing it after that first year. So I locked the kids in the basement while I hid the eggs. I was given a walkie talkie with which to communicate, but it had neither a belt clip nor a fist mic and so I left it in the kitchen. I occasionally heard squawks coming out of it and I’m sure they wondered if I was ever going to let them out.
You must understand that they dyed thirty-three eggs.
This happened while CC and I were at work. Also, when I envision the kids covering the dining room table to protect it while doing an art project, I see cardboard. I see newspaper.
I never would have thought of wrapping paper. Ingenious. Wrapping paper that is eight dollars a roll plus shipping because I order it online a couple times a year in futile hope that there will always be wrapping paper for the nine billion birthdays we celebrate. The stuff that is stored right next to the plain brown, inexpensive craft paper. Neat.
In addition to thirty-three real eggs, I had twelve plastic ones, filled with various things. Forty-five eggs, that is, and I don’t even need #5 to help me with that.
I made it hard. We don’t really have a yard. We have a steeply raked (think: three stories high) and tiered mud and rock bank with 192,000 plantings put in by the crazy gardening woman who lived here before us.
I like how kids think parents won’t ever exert themselves. We exert ourselves constantly, what with the pretending to cook and running around and pretending to clean and buying things and also the working part. We parents are fully capable of exertion. A kid bases their concept of a parent not wanting to exert any effort because the kid comes to the parent at 9:30pm, on the parent’s only night off, when said parent is right in the middle of story time with a younger sibling and is tired from running around all day and in fact has already changed into comfy but cute yoga pants or maybe more correctly never got properly dressed that day and is thinking only of trying to get all these kids to bed to spend some quality time with the other parent if you know what I mean, and the kid says that they need posterboard for a very important project that is due tomorrow, so not only will the parent have to go out and buy the posterboard but the kid will need help with the project and also permission to stay up way past their bed time, and the parent swears, not exactly at them but definitely in front of them.
Children are incapable of understanding fine distinctions like this.
I exerted myself for the egg hunt. What better cause to spend effort on than your own personal amusement at the expense of your kids?
I pulled on my boots and hid those eggs on all three stories’ worth of that steeply raked mud and rock bank. I camouflaged them under the piles of leaves that I never raked up last fall, tucked them in among the crazy gardening lady’s 192,000 plantings, put them behind trees and inside separated bits of the retaining wall.
Of the plastic eggs, I issued this decree: One has a five dollar bill in it. One contains dog poop.
Oh, and we’ve had a lot of rain. And it was like eighty degrees yesterday.
There was an awful lot of complaining about how much work the egg hunt was.
The five-dollar bill one I hid in the recycling bin. #3 actually paused in front of the trash and recycling bins, looked back at me, and decided that it was too icky and I wouldn’t have wanted to touch that.
She forgets how many times I have cleaned up her vomit.
So everyone was pissed when #5, being fearless, dove headfirst into the recycling bin and retrieved a pink plastic egg that did, in fact, turn out to have a five dollar bill in it.
#2 was the one who found the very last plastic egg. They were all so convinced that I had spoken the truth regarding a dog poop egg that she opened it gingerly at arm’s length and the candy it contained exploded out all over the ground. Proving that despite all evidence to the contrary, they do still, at times, listen to me.
I win.
JM Randolph, accidentalstepmom 
Sounds like a very exciting Easter egg hunt.
I’m glad it was the “exciting without a trip to the emergency room for anyone (namely me)” kind of exciting.
No zip ties or razor knives were involved.
It did indeed sound eggciting.
Um, yeah. I learned my lesson. Still have the scars.
Ingenious! 🙂 Sounds like an awesome way to have fun with the kids while tormenting them at the same time..
Darlene
It’s the best of both words, really.
extreme Easter egg hunting! i like it! it sounds much more fun than the last one we had. We usually did them in the house, with my parents desperately trying to keep track of how many (and which) eggs were found, to ensure that we didn’t have any fun surprises in June 😛
Inside is scary. Very scary.
The rage I felt when my son use to pull the “I have a project due in 12 hours” b.s. just overwhelemed me so much that I am fully expecting my phone to ring with such news. It’s similar to the feeling one gets after dreaming that your husband has had an affair and you’re sort of pissed off at him the next day even though they didn’t really do anything wrong.
Poop egg=priceless.
You most certainly do win.
I’m always getting pissed about things people do in my dreams. They don’t get it.
Sounds like ya had fun! Yay for #5! That’s a lot of eggs! Mine are to old to enjoy anymore! Glad you all had fun!
My mother started a tradition with all the grown kids and the grandkids. I’m the only one who doesn’t live there so I rarely get to participate. She does some new twist every year. The year I came we all got squirt guns as defense. The grandkids weren’t hunting, they were obstacles for us. Lots of fun.
simply put, you are hilarious.
this blog makes me want to find some kids to parent.
I totally have some you can borrow.
Can I borrow #5? 😀 😛
He’s available as a rental only.
Ha ha,
Very entertaining.
Cool story, must have been fun
‘Twas. Thanks for reading!
Perfect. Simply perfect. I think I love #5.
I love him too! I think he was actually upset about there not being a dog poop egg. He kept pointing out all the dog poop, in case I wanted to load up an egg after all.
Ok, it’s confirmed. I DO love him.
I finally learned to hide the wrapping paper and about 3 million other things I didn’t want ruined. I also remember being handed the load of school papers that needed to be signed 45 seconds before we were supposed to head out the door in the morning…which was usually later than planned anyway. You are a trooper…keep these gems coming.
Tape is the big one I have to hide. What is so appealing about tape? And mostly I hate that last-minute stuff because I’m already so last-minute, there are no more last minutes to go around.
I am impressed… we only did 9 eggs… it would have been 12 but I wanted scrambled eggs one day. 😉
They would have done 36 except we made french toast!
Hahahahaha…OH MY GOD, you crack me up. That was awesome, my Easter was like way boring, and I am a horrible mother. Ok and my kids are 20 and 16. Maybe it’s not all my fault…
I think your kids are old enough to where they should be doing Easter for you. Basket, chocolate bunny, egg hunt, the whole deal. Especially after the Police Incident.
YAAAAA think? I totally agree with that one!!!
That must have been so much fun! For you, I mean :). A few years ago, I hid eggs in really clever places (inside the house) and promptly forgot where exactly myself. The kids found all of them except one. And they were real eggs. Need I say more how we we were able to find that one very well hidden egg after a few days?
Oh dear, I know only too well. As I was hiding them, I was thinking I should probably write down where they were. We lucked out this year.
Your mom sounds like a blast. Why don’t you just hide the kids next year? Dye some garbage cans, TAPE the kids into them, wrap in expensive paper, (oh,and include dog poop with one of them) and hide them around the neighborhood? (do not mention there is no one to hunt for them) This could be fun.
Of course, I have no kids, so I am not sure if this would be considered unethical treatment of kids or not…aw, WTH – it sounds like fun!
This is brilliant. I have to make sure my mom sees this.
Oh I love your blog! Hilarious.
My youngest used to text me at work to ask me to go to school to sign something he’d forgotten to give me the previous evening. Gotta love kids eh? ( Or so I keep telling myself ).
Ha! Yeah, those texts never show up on my phone. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!
I’m going for my ‘flu shot in the morning – the last one I will go for alone. I’m picturing next year’s trip! By comparison I think the easter eggs will be a breeze.
Love the dog poop idea – might just have to hold onto that for future use!
Good luck with your shot. I go back and forth about whether it’s better to do things like that with everyone all at once, or split them up.
I would have loved to have seen this Easter egg hunt. An interesting variation on the dog poop egg might have been to tell the kids a $50 dollar bill was inside an egg hidden in dog poop.
That’s brilliant. I’m so using this. Minus the actual $50 bill, of course.
Very cool. My kids and step-kids did not get excited about the egg hunt or the baskets I “exerted myself” filling. They did, however, get excited when their grandpa fell in the pool. http://lifewellblended.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/easter-re-cap/
Those pictures made me happy!
I can’t even tell you how fantastic this is. I believed you, too!!
You wanna come next year?