This past weekend, my friend Megan and I were looking for a suitable activity for our moody threenagers. It seems like they are going through that common phase where life seems utterly unfair at all times. I’m fully aware that often Katie’s difficult mood is entirely my fault – if only I would let her drive the car or play with the gas hob things would just be wonderful!
After some consideration, we set about looking for something active, preferably outdoors, and that didn’t require lots of sharing!
I was very surprised to find that there we were not inundated with adverts for Spring walks or Easter egg hunts. It seems that all of those are actually on Easter weekend and no one is cashing in early!
With nothing else to lose, we knew it was time to get our Pinterest research hats on and create our own Instagram-worthy egg hunt going.
To begin we knew it would be a catastrophic idea to let our little darlings consume lots of chocolate! Aside the effects on health and teeth – they are already energetic enough and don’t need anything to add to their hyperactive behaviour!
With that in mind, I set about finding refillable eggs in an assortment of sizes and colours. Megan was amazing at sourcing a wide array of small toys to fill these – so we had bunnies, chicks, duck crayons, rubbers, magnets, pom poms, dice, stickers, and little key chains. All of these were purchased for around £1 and we knew the girls would love the selection.
To avoid conflict we prepared two identical eggs to hide in each location. This had the added bonus that the girls had to work together and took away any element of competition – much easier to avoid any hurt feelings!
Luckily for us, Megan has access to a gated garden in Edinburgh which provided us with a perfect location to hide eggs nestled amongst the blue bells, crocus, daffodils and tree roots.
It’s surprising that no matter how obvious you think the hiding places may be – a toddler can run past that egg an incredible amount of times. This was a great exercise in teaching them to really slow down and look at the world around them. So often we rush around and don’t really take time to observe, even though we chose hiding places next to eye catching flowers or even out on the open grass – they often completely missed it and we had to resort to very obvious hints.
Although a little competitive at times, the girls really entered into the spirit of the hunt and were determined to find all of our hiding places! They did run round together and would call over to us that they had found more. They seemed very taken with ‘collecting treasure’ in their baskets and it turned out to be a charming activity.
Finally, as a treat for finding all their spoils we created an afternoon tea for small children complete with mini bottles of water, homemade apple and oatmeal muffins, chocolate brownies and cornflake cakes.
The girls were amazed to discover the ‘fairy house’ set up for tea and played very nicely with their toys as we slowly ate our treats (and the Mamas sipped tea!)
Katie and Charlotte were soon having conversations between the chicks and the bunnies. It was so heartening to see their imaginations lit up and for them to be able to play nicely TOGETHER after so many years of watching them play alongside year other. It’s so fun to watch their relationship continue to grow as they develop and I hope we will all look back on these photos together in many years time.
The girls soon wanted to hunt for more eggs and didn’t seem to care that they didn’t have anything in them. They quickly had a game of hiding them for each other and repeating the fun of the afternoon.
Since then Katie has been setting up her own hunts for Thomas and me. It seems like a bag of plastic eggs is one of the best purchases of the year thus far!
Are you attending any egg-citing events this year? Or are you tempted to create your own Easter egg hunt? I’d love to hear your ideas over on our Facebook page
