by Dr S Guru

Created on: April 13, 2009   Last Updated: April 26, 2009

Every year at Easter the thoughts that surround having an Easter Egg Hunt for my children are not very pleasant. I do not have any fond memories of the many Easter Egg Hunts we have had over the years even though we continue to hide eggs for the children because we have started a tradition and we are suckers for punishment. The howling and crying generally starts straight away because the youngest child of three cannot keep up with the two bigger children and he feels 'hard done by' because his legs are unfortunately much shorter.

We have tried the method whereby the youngest child gets to search out his Easter Eggs first...... this results in crying because everyone is watching him hunt for eggs that he cannot find, mean while the other children look on shouting "I can see it from here" and "hurry up before the ants get the chocolate." We have tried the "Your getting hot, warm, lukewarm and cold" method.....this results in crying even from the eldest child who is nearly in his teens and cannot seem understand why you can be hot one moment and lukewarm the next without having ever reached warm, this is for the sake of an argument because at his age he likes to argue each and every point whether there be an Easter Egg at the end of it or not. Some Easter Egg Hunts start off better than others, like the time we allocated them seven minute searches each, with timeouts for swapping, toilet breaks and drink breaks or the odd squabble over who had three seconds longer. This was definitely one of the better hunts because the children knew that once they had found four eggs each that was it and the game was over for them. They generally had between four and five turns each and the seven minutes per turn meant we could all be involved in the game by way of counting down the minutes.

What ruined this Easter Egg Hunt was the fact that the children were not happy with the colors of the shiny wrappers on the chocolate eggs they found. Our daughter found one blue, one green and two orange eggs and she was quite content with these until our eldest son had his turn and came back with three pink eggs and one yellow egg and of course he refused to swap them with her because she obviously had not shed enough tears for his liking. Also no-one wanted to swap with the youngest in the family who had yellow and purple eggs, which sent him into floods of tears because he thought there was something wrong with his eggs and he refused to have anything to do with them.

So this Easter the hunt is going to be different, all shiny eggs will be the same color with no variation in size or shape, all shiny eggs will be placed in a position around the garden where they can be clearly seen, all children will hunt separately and alone, the eldest child will search in silence and there will be no swapping or fun in general! With these rules in place this will be a most enjoyable Easter I can feel it...

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