Great Day for an Easter Egg Hunt

We had a really good day today...  

This is quite an accomplishment, actually, as the last several weekends--as far back as the memory goes, in fact--have been pretty rough...  I don't need a doctor to know that our family would be diagnosed with a severe case of Cabin Fever...  It's been a long winter...

But the Mrs. and I are fresh off a rejuvenating four-day trip to warm and sunny Las Vegas, and today was a gorgeous spring day in central Indiana:  crystal clear blue skies, nice and sunny, cool breeze, and temperatures in the upper 50's...  Warm in the sun with just a touch of chill in the shade...

For those who may not know, we have two daughters...  Our oldest--we'll call her Olivia--just turned 3 years old...  Our youngest--we'll call her June--is 21 months old...  They are 15 months apart...  Olivia is a classic three-year-old, and June has recently entered her Terrible Twos...  They are very close as sisters, but they also squabble like sisters...  And they're terribly jealous of each other...  What one gets, the other one wants...  If June was getting a tetanus shot in her eyelid with an 11-inch-long rusty syringe, Olivia would want one, too...

As any parent knows, most days have their good and their bad parts...  It goes in waves...  Every night that you can put the kids to bed without any major injuries and with some semblance of your sanity left is considered a good day...

Not all days are good...

Today, though, was a great day...

It started with the Mrs. letting me sleep in obscenely late this morning...  Normally, I would return the favor tomorrow, but Olivia is about to come out of her skin with excitement about the Easter Bunny's visit tonight, so I suspect we'll both be bounced out of bed at around 3:47am to see what the Easter Bunny brought...  So the Mrs. really sacrificed for me this morning...

I stumbled out to the kitchen, fired up the coffee pot, and then realized that I smelled something good in the air...  The Mrs. had some blueberry muffins in the oven!  Score!  

After eleventy-seven warm blueberry muffins and a few cups of coffee, I got a few hours of alone time (quite the rare commodity around here) as the Mrs. took Olivia shopping for shoes, and June went down for her daily nap...  I took a ridiculously long shower, perused Yahoo! Sports at my leisure, cleaned up the kitchen, and ran the vacuum through the house...

The Mrs. and Olivia returned with several good deals on shoes, one pair in particular that Olivia was especially thrilled with:  a new pair of Dora the Explorer sandals...  The Mrs. still seemed to have her sanity and her good mood when they returned, so Olivia must have behaved in the stores...

June woke up from her nap just in time for us to go to our very first Easter Egg Hunt!  We had a little hunt in the back yard last year for Olivia, but we had never been to a community-wide Easter Egg Hunt...  We chose to attend the one at McCloud Nature Park, in Hendricks County, a few miles west of the city...  We've been to the Nature Park before, and we have always enjoyed it...  

The Nature Park did things well...  They may do this at all public egg hunts (I have nothing to which to compare this experience), but at the Nature Park, they divided the kids up into three age groups...  Both of our girls went to the "3 and Under" section...  I was relieved that we wouldn't have to be battling 12-year-olds for eggs...  They led us over to our area and had us form a big square around the eggs in the grass...  I took June, while the Mrs. took Olivia...

I admit that I was pretty skeptical about how this was going to go...  There were a lot of eggs on the ground, but there were a lot of kids, too...and adults with them...  The adults were who I was concerned about...  Neither of our girls had ever done this before, so they were going to be a little slow to catch on to the game...  While they learned, I feared, all the eggs would be snatched up around them and in front of them...  The Nature Park officials had urged everyone beforehand to be kind to one another and to share if you see a child not getting any eggs, and they advised that there were additional eggs in the main building if a child was not able to capture an egg in the grass...  But they also said that there were BIG prizes in a few of the eggs, never revealing what the BIG prizes were, but leaving us all with visions of a big-screen TV or a new car or something...  I cringed, imagining a scene like at Wal-Mart on the morning of Black Friday...  With all of this information rattling around in my brain, I'm fearing that my kids are going to be trampled in the ensuing chaos...

June and I positioned ourselves near a pocket of eggs that June would only have to take about 3 steps to reach...  There were about 8 eggs in this little spot, and I'm thinking that if I throw a couple of forearm shivers on some parents, use a few eye gouges, bash some people over the back with a folding chair, wave my gun around, and fire a few shots in the air, June might stand a chance at getting one or two eggs...

(To my law enforcement and prosecutor friends who may be reading this, I didn't really have a gun with me at the Nature Park...  I was just imagining...)

So I was a bit surprised, as we waited for the starting horn, when I heard a mother near me instructing her 3-year-old son to go toward the middle of the search area, and let the younger kids have the edges...  Wow!  Someone thinking about others!  It's an Easter miracle!

And when the horn sounded to start the scramble, June trotted out to the little patch of eggs in front of us...and no one else crowded us...or even approached us!  I hadn't even shot any dirty looks or made any threatening gestures toward anyone...  Everyone was considerate of everyone else!  I never heard any yelling or screaming or fighting anywhere in our big pasture full of eggs...  All I heard was kids having fun!

June had an absolute blast...  I had to show her what she was supposed to do, but after one egg's worth of demonstration, she was all about picking up the colorful eggs and putting them in her bag...  I really enjoyed my few minutes of relaxed one-on-one time with my youngest...  

At the end of it all (which was incredibly quick, I must add), the Mrs. and Olivia found us, and the girls had fun opening their eggs...  June, being allergic to milk and eggs, couldn't have any of the chocolate treats inside, but she didn't care...  She was just having fun opening the eggs...  Olivia, on the other hand, crammed fists full of chocolate into her mouth as fast as she could relieve them of their foil wrappers...  

We took a nice walk down to the creek--both because it was a gorgeous day and because Olivia was now TOTALLY jacked up on chocolate--where we threw rocks in the water for quite awhile...  The girls had fun, and I skipped rocks for the first time in forever...  The sound of the creek was peaceful, and it was fun impressing my kids with my ability to make a rock splash two or three times before it disappeared, as well as being able to to throw a rock all the way across the creek...

We walked back to the car, turned our empty plastic eggs in to the Park Office to be used next year, and took a leisurely drive to Wendy's for dinner...  The girls behaved themselves in Wendy's, they ate a lot of their dinners, and they didn't trash the place...  It was quite a relaxed time!

Once home, the Mrs. and the girls watched a little TV while I mowed the lawn for the first time this season, and when I came back into the house, everyone was still relaxed and in good moods...  The Mrs. didn't have a homicidal look in her eyes, which meant that the kids were good while Daddy was mowing...

We had an evening snack of popcorn, and the girls went to bed without any issues...

It was a fantastic day!  I got to sleep in late...warm blueberry muffins for breakfast...a few hours of alone time...no tension or yelling or screaming or throwing fits or crying all day long (and the kids didn't do any of that stuff, either!)...lots of quality family time...lots of time outside on a beautiful day...and a little bit of renewed faith in humanity after our great experience at the Nature Park...  

It was a great day for an Easter Egg Hunt...and for us as a family...