Easter Basket (cases)

Before we went to bed on Saturday night, both Phoebe and Alexander had to check in about our traditions. Alexander wanted to know if we would be reading our scripture eggs on the way down the stairs (absolutely). Phoebe wanted to know if this was the day the Easter Bunny would be stopping by (she was okay with this...unlike the leprechauns).

I think they're first of all making sure that we're prepared ("Did you get candy?!"), but also just verifying what precisely these holidays are about (religiously and otherwise). My phone camera was rather glitchy today (it didn't want to take any pictures and the pictures it did get were often blurry and I'm not sure why it couldn't focus today), so excuse the photographic evidence of our day.

Here are Benjamin, Phoebe, and Alexander hiding and waiting in our bed while we were waiting for Zoë and Miriam to come upstairs...so that we could go downstairs together:

We first did our egg scripture reading using the same eggs that we made during FHE back in 2015 (according to this post):

Here's the flurry of excitement when the kids were discovering their baskets:

Phoebe was most excited, Zoë was least excited and everyone else ran the gamut between those two. I have no idea what Zoë was expecting in her basket but let's just say that it was not whatever it was we put inside her basket—a set of magnetic blocks, a graphic novel, hair clips, candy. What more could a girl want?!

Paintbrushes apparently. 

Lucky for her, she found a pack sitting on the counter that Andrew had found in a drawer a couple of days ago. 

"Ooooh—new paintbrushes!" she said excitedly. 

"Do you want those?" I asked. 

"Yes!" she said. 

"Awesome—they're yours!" (I am very generous these days). "We meant to put them in your basket, probably."

"K, thanks!" she said. 

And just like that Easter was better.

So, anyway...

Phoebe was super excited about this tiny tube of toothpaste that the Easter Bunny left in her basket. Daddy had a work trip back in February—to Doha, of all places—and he brought home a tiny tube of toothpaste from the hotel and Phoebe carted that thing around like it was the most precious thing in the world. "May I use my fresh mint toothpaste?" she'd ask at bedtime (and then we'd have to ration out the tiniest of portions so that we could make it last a long time) or she'd demand "Where is my Doha toothpaste?!" if she happened to misplace it. 

She finally used it all up and was rather sad to say goodbye to that tiny tube of toothpaste, but then I found another tiny tube of toothpaste while I was looking for just regular ordinary toothpaste (turns out we were out altogether) so I saved it for her Easter basket...and gave the kids a normal dentist sample tube to use until we got to the store to buy another full-sized tube for their bathroom.

That was just one exciting thing about her basket—toothpaste!

She also got a little box full of pink barrettes with flowers on them. This was very exciting for her because she wore a pink flower barrette to the park a few weeks ago (one that Rachel or Miriam got from Grandma years ago) and it fell out while she was playing, never to be seen again. 

She was devastated.

But now she has an entire box of back-ups! 

"Even if I lose one, I will have another!" she cheered.

That will work for her approximately 20 times before it's no longer true. 

"What else did the Easter Bunny bring you?" I asked her.

She began listing items off as she pulled them out of her basket.

"The Easter Bunny brought me play-doh! And some candy! And some more flower clips! And..."

Her little hand wrapped around the carton of "Robin's Eggs" in her basket.

"...some milk!" she sang, lifting the carton.

To her surprise, the carton didn't slosh. It rattled.

"Uhhh...that's not milk...?" 

"It's candy," I said. 

"Candy in a carton. Huh."

I'm not really sure how she knows what a carton of milk is because she's never seen an actual carton of milk, but I think she has a toy carton of milk in her play kitchen. 

Once the baskets had been fully discovered the kids set to work finding all the eggs that had been hidden around the house—up high, down low, obvious spots, less-obvious spots.

Here's Phoebe before we convinced her that it would be more efficient to carry her Easter basket around than it would be to collect eggs in her hands and carry them to wherever she had last left her basket:

Here's a picture of Benjamin bending down to put an egg into his basket...while Phoebe is taking an egg out of his basket:

All's fair in love and war...and all that.

Benjamin thought it was very silly that an egg had been hidden in the water boiler:

I don't remember what Alexander thought was funny here, but he's cute:

I do know that he was overjoyed to find these ginormous eggs that were hiding in each fireplace (with the same, like, 5 jellybeans inside that the small eggs had, much to Alexander's disappointment):

Here's Zoë trying to understand my hints about there being an egg hidden on the whiteboard:

Here's Alexander reaching for an egg (that I ended up getting down for him):

And here's Phoebe trying to decide if she can climb on top of the bookshelf to get at the golden egg on top of the picture frame:

We were very lucky that egg was still hiding because when Phoebe was counting her eggs and realized that she didn't have any golden eggs (thanks to Zoë for talking about how many golden eggs she had found) she suddenly wanted a golden egg more than anything in the world. But not just any golden egg! She wanted to find a golden egg that was already hidden.

She didn't want a pity golden egg—no thanks to that! 

She wanted a legit golden egg—from the wild (or whatever).

Fortunately, I had seen that the kids hadn't found this particular golden egg. They had done a rather decent job hunting for eggs, but I still know of a few that they have overlooked. We'll probably be finding eggs for a few weeks...but I'm sure we will eventually find them all. 

Anyway, this particular egg was one that I helped Phoebe retrieve. And it counted as a legit golden egg, even with the assistance (thank goodness).

I know some households are more organized than mine. For example, some households will, like, colour-coordinate eggs for the children, assigning each child a colour of eggs to find. Or, as Andrew recalled from his childhood, each child would get a room in which to look for a given number of eggs. And that's cool. I applaud those systems if they work for those parents. 

We're a little more...entropic...at our house.

We just hide a bunch of eggs and let the kids have at 'em.

Do I know precisely how many eggs there are? Absolutely not.

Do I care that each child finds the same number of eggs? Not remotely.

I explained that to the kids this morning before turning them loose, and talked to them about how fairness can work in a situation like this. Like, if you're a big kid and you're finding a billion eggs with swiftness and intensity and a little kid starts crying because they can't find any eggs...you might be doing it wrong (with a capital r).

Side quest story: The other night Andrew was talking with Miriam and he told her that she was, "Wrong with a capital R!" and she just about died laughing. Because, of course...it should be a capital W.

We ran through a number of scenarios, such as: 

If you're big, maybe don't take any eggs below your waistline (there are plenty of eggs hidden up high). 

If you're little, maybe don't steal eggs out of anyone else's basket (that lesson didn't really stick with Phoebe, but we also reminded the kids that it didn't matter how many eggs anyone got because (a) we pool all of the candy into a common pot anyway and (b) they were welcome to re-hide and re-find the eggs as many times as they wanted to). 

Aside from the golden egg meltdown, things went smoothly in our little búsqueda de huevos del caos (just...egg hunt of chaos, but I like the way huevos and chaos sound together so I went with Spanish).  

Miriam (who had helped us hide the eggs) had hidden a number in the dishwasher—among the silverware, under a cup, etc. She tried valiantly to get Phoebe to put away her dishes so that Phoebe could be happily surprised by a few extra eggs...but somehow or other Phoebe got away without putting away the dishes. So eventually Miriam just fetched all the eggs out of the dishwasher, rather disappointed in her ruse. 

But other than that the egg hunt went smoothly.

PS. I thought about sending Rachel an Easter...something. But life is...what it is...and I neglected to do so. So she teased me about forgetting about her. And I was like, "Wow. Sorry." And even reserved some candy for her. But, as it turns out, she went to her friend Corbin's grandma's house for General Conference and they had an Easter basket for her on Sunday morning (which was so nice of them; I was glad she had something).

I'm afraid I'm not the best at having grown up kids yet. 

(I have no clue what I'm doing).