The beginning of Easter at home

Usually we go up to Maine for Easter with my mother's family. I looked in the archives, but it seems I've never blogged about it. Oh well, I do have the photos to show for it.

Anyway we decided to stay home for Easter this year. The boys were disappointed, but after discovering that it was the activities they were going to miss, and not their cousins, we decided to recreate the activities here at home with friends.

So Easter began today with an Easter Party at our house; an attempt to recreate part of what we would experience at Uncle Larry's house on Easter afternoon. If we had realized kids had off from school today, we may have invited more people, but we decided we were happy having just our "core" playgroup friends over.

We started with making a craft. All the kids seemed to enjoy making their egg sun catchers. They are made out of tissue paper stuck to clear contact paper, with a hole punched into the top and hung on suction cup hooks. They all came out great. The craft is something we had never done at Uncle Larry's, but all the kids had fun, and the moms seemed to appreciate having the art to bring home.

One tradition at Uncle Larry's has been to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. So we did that. Our friend J guessed 353, and there were 361, so she got to bring the jar home.

I attempted to get some real food into the kids with a selection of fruit and vegetables and some pizza rolls, which everyone actually ate and seemed to enjoy, before heading outside for the point of the whole thing.

The main tradition we needed to recreate, was of course, the egg hunt. So I hid 72 plastic eggs filled to the brims with candy, all around our backyard. And of course, there had to be one large, special egg. So we had a "golden egg" (large, yellow) well hidden with $5 in it. Oh boy, that really inspired the kids! I hid it well though, and had to give them an obscene amount of hints until one of them found it. Another J was thrilled to find that.

After we determined we'd never find the four missing eggs, we decided to come in and enjoy the cupcakes R had made and E and I had frosted.

I do have a photo of all the kids together, but I decided that this time around I'd post a photo of the moms, since my blog readers rarely get to see photos of my friends.

We had a really nice afternoon. For a few hours work (yes, I have a clean house, for a few days anyway) and less money than the trip to Maine would have been, the boys had a fun time running around looking for eggs and we all had fun being with friends.

Tomorrow night we will color our eggs...the next tradition I have to "match".