The Thrill of the Hunt

It is really quite amazing that Easter has come and gone. We spent the weekend at home with families and survived three Easter egg hunts without incident.

Easter Egg Hunt #1: The Kaysville City Hunt

Some things you can be late to without a problem. An Easter egg hunt is not one of those. Saturday morning Kaysville city held its annual Easter egg hunt at 10am sharp. As is usually the case, we were running a little behind that morning and with the unexpected task of cleaning snow off the car, we left a little late. At 9:57am we rolled into the park. The challenge then became finding out where we were supposed to be. In an effort to prevent 12-year-old boys from stealing eggs from 2-year-old toddlers, Kaysville city splits the hunt across four baseball fields.

The problem for us was identifying which of the four fields was for 0-3 year-old children and getting the C-monster there in less than three minutes. After running ahead to spec out the fields I found that Cayden's field was on the far side of the park. I ran back to Suz and Cayden. Suz is a little preggers right now so they were not moving extremely fast. I picked Cayden up and started running. As we were running Cayden asked "Why are you carrying me." Without exaggeration, I arrived to the front line where hundreds of small children were anxiously awaiting the signal and put Cayden down. No less than five seconds later, the voice on the PA system said "GO!"

Chaos broke out and I did my best to keep the C-monster in view as he moved from egg to egg. Within two minutes every egg on the field had been claimed and the field was empty. Had we arrived at 9:59am, we would have been out of luck.

Easter Egg Hunt #2: The Blair Family Hunt

With all six of her grandchildren now living in Utah, my mom was more than excited for this hunt. She cleverly devised a system where each grandchild was assigned a color of eggs to search for. All the child needed to do was find eggs that matched the color of his or her basket. While some eggs contained candy and money, others contained slips of paper indicating a prize they could then claim from grandma. The eggs were then hidden by the adults according the the color/grandchild difficulty matrix. Three of the oldest grandchild's eggs were never found, suggesting the difficulty matrix may need to be tweaked...or eggs should only be hidden by a responsible adult.

In theory this was a brilliant plan. In execution, it took quite a bit of training to teach Cayden to pick up yellow eggs -- only yellow eggs.

Easter Egg Hunt #3: The Todd Family Hunt

With 18 grandchildren on the Todd side (at time of publishing), grandchild-specific coloring schemes are not an option without a professional-grade paint mixer. The hunt began in a frenzy. As I followed Cayden around I noticed he was picking up a lot of eggs and putting them back down, but very few were making into his basket. This catch-and-release approach had me concerned and then I noticed that all the eggs in his basket were orange -- just like his basket. Just as I was putting this together Cayden placed another egg back on the ground stating: "Not orange."

"No Cayden, it's all fair game." I said. "You can pick up any egg." After a slow start, we picked the pace up and grabbed as many eggs as we could.

Because the grandchildren had already been to several egg hunts and likely accumulated too much candy to safely consume, Suzanne's Mom decided to fill some eggs with nickels instead. Another great plan in theory. From a strictly fiscal perspective, however, for a child nickels are not as liquid of an asset as candy. Once back inside, some of the children pushed the nickels aside and filtered out the candy. While most of the children did this, one entrepreneurial grandchild recognized an opportunity and helped several children liquidate their fiscal inventory by exchanging his surplus of candy for their otherwise useless nickels.

All in all, it was a successful weekend for Cayden and a tiring weekend for mom and dad.