Easter Egg "Hunt" -- Part Two

Easter Sunday dawned bright and sunny... oh, no, wait, Vancouver already used its monthly allotment of four sunshine-hours on Good Friday. Easter Sunday dawned gray and rainy, just like every other morning for the past six months. "Damn," grumbled the Easter Bunny (aka mom), "we're going to have to have the egg hunt inside." Normally, this would be an ideal situation, but given the amount of chaos in our tiny living space, I could put the eggs out in the wide open, and there'd still be a 75% chance Nathan wouldn't see them for the rest of the clutter.

But the rain gods were on my side. A brief two hour respite from the rain allowed me to scatter the plastic eggs (filled with two Lindor foil eggs) around the back yard.

Nathan woke up from his nap and I dragged him outside to see what the Easter Bunny had brought. Given his scare yesterday from seeing a life-size, talking stuffed animal, he didn't seem all that enthusiastic. However, once he discovered the first egg (Dad was pointing to it saying, "Look Nathan, there's an egg" as a subtle hint), he was on his way to the races. It only took him about 30 minutes to locate the nine eggs in plain sight. I can tell David and I are going to have to put Nate through some heavy-duty training this year to prep him for the 2008 Easter Egg Games.

Anyway, 8 chocolate eggs later, Nate was a happy camper. But I still have one question... why is it that a child who has a hard time placing a toy in a 2 foot by 3 foot basket (when cleaning up) can perform the delicate operation of peeling the foil off of a chocolate egg in 10 seconds flat?

Hunting...



Gathering...



Trophy collecting...



Posing with the kill...



Enjoying the spoils

Easter Egg "Hunt" -- Part One

This weekend we exposed Nathan to the joys of the Easter bunny. Okay, the teenage girl dressed up as the Easter bunny scared the sh*t out of Nathan. Let me say, this weekend, we exposed Nathan to the joys of foil covered chocolate eggs.

On Saturday, we drove down to Heywood Park in North Vancouver where the Lion's Club was sponsoring an Easter egg hunt for children aged 2 to 10. Given my proclivity for arriving early to any event, we ate a donut while waiting for the hunt to officially start. Good thing too, because the line up got pretty deep pretty fast. You could see that the parents were trying to play it cool for their kids, but there was some subtle jostling for position in line. We were in the 4 year old and under field, and since we were near the beginning of the line, we managed to get good field position. Now, when this event was labelled a hunt, it was somewhat of a misnomer. The eggs were spread all around on the ground. There was no hiding involved. Probably appropriate to the "finding" skills of a group of humans who have only recently mastered walking, running and bending up and down.

My fear was that Nate would not be able to compete with the crowds of kids for the eggs. This was not the problem. We were so far forward in the field, that there was no one around us for about 4 minutes. In that time, Nathan stood there, with all sorts of coloured foiled balls literally at his feet and... did nothing. Nathan picked up one egg on his own and that was it. In the four minutes it took us to convince him to pick them up, the hoards made it to our spot and swept past. Kinda like a swarm of locusts.

Nathan abandonned the whole event and dragged David over to the swing set. A much more civilized pursuit.

Nathan's first taste of donut. At first he looks like he thinks we want to poison him.




Here he is... stunned is an accurate description. Note the speed at which the boy behind him is gathering eggs.



Nathan's one conquest -- a purple egg.



The locusts descend.



Nate goes in search of more civilized pursuits.