Saturday morning, the kids woke up super excited to start the Easter egg hunt "right now!" But Mom and Dad had a few other things on the agenda first; namely a trip to my most favorite store in the universe, Ikea! I have been slowly reorganizing my craft/guest room and needed a few more things to complete the transformation. We also wanted something to put outside our front door to hold the overflow of shoes we have. The younger kids were disappointed at first, but with the promise of hot dogs and ice cream afterward, they decided it wouldn't be so bad after all. Nick, however, refused to come at all. He hates Ikea as much as I love it, and the thought of spending even part of one precious vacation day trapped in there was just too much to bear. :) So we let him stay home.
Normally, going there on a Saturday morning is to take your life in your hands. It is crazy packed, hardly any parking, and wall to wall people in the store. But during holidays, it is much calmer, since everyone else is away on vacation. Except for this Saturday during a holiday. Apparently, every decided to wait and go on vacation a couple weeks later during actual spring holidays, and go shopping at Ikea over Easter. It.was.bedlam. We had our first inkling that it was going to be far worse than anything we could have imagined when the man directing parking led us to the employee parking lot. Yes, they had forced the employees to park who knows where, so that more shoppers could use their spots. The benefit was that we didn't have to pay for the parking. But this meant, that one hour after opening, the top lot, the entire underground lot and all street parking was used up! Yikes.
We went inside, and discovered that yes, it was a bit crowded, but not nearly as bad as the outside would suggest. Weird. It was like all the extra people got swallowed up in some magic Ikea black hole. Anyway, we had our shopping list and began methodically plodding our way through the store, trying to find everything. Of course, this is Ikea, so I also found a few things that weren't on the list, that I suddenly couldn't live a single moment longer without. The kids were really well behaved, although it wasn't as much fun as our last trip to Ikea, where we had time to go in every single miniature apartment and pretend we lived there. We did, however, end up having to backtrack twice, when we discovered that the thing we were looking for wasn't where we thought it would be, but was somewhere in a section we had already been through. Due to the crowds, we hadn't been able to see the item when we were there the first time around.
Finally, we were all the way to the checkout with everything on our list in the overflowing shopping cart, but we still hadn't found something to hold all the extra shoes. Chris really was tired of the shoe soup that always greeted our visitors, so he tracked down an employee and asked where in the store such an item might be located. Turns out it was way back, almost to the beginning. The kids let out a collective groan at the thought of swimming upstream through all the people, back all those steps to get to where the shoe holders were. I told them we could sit right here on this comfortable patio chairs and just Papa would go back. It would be faster and easier that way. Smiles all around again. Although, after the first 5 minutes of waiting, being in such close proximity to their food reward and not being able to actually get it, proved to be a bigger challenge than the boredom of waiting.
Finally, we were out of there, mouths full of hot dog, and on our way home. We called poor Nicholas to let him know we were, in fact, still alive, just behind schedule due to the crowds. We got home, ate some quick lunch and then it was time for the real fun to begin.
This year, instead of just candy, I decided to make the egg hunt a little more exciting for the kids. They are getting older, and thankfully, they aren't total sugar fiends, so candy wasn't a big draw anyway. I told them there were five golden eggs, one for each of them, and inside was something better than candy; cold, hard cash! The eggs weren't really gold, just yellow plastic ones I had, but it gave the whole egg hunt that extra needed dash of adventure.
We went to our traditional hiding spot, the kids' school playground. The kids went to play, while we hid them in the kindergarten part of the school. Then we called over Alexandra and Noah to start first.
Eventually all the kids were running around, looking for both the plastic eggs and the real colored eggs we had hidden.
The thing I love most about our family egg hunt, is the freedom to do it how we want. So, after all the eggs were found, and the kids had had a chance to play on the playground,
they decided they wanted us to hide the eggs again over at the other playground. We walked over there, but found several other families enjoying the nice weather. So we just let the kids play with their friends, and then called it a day. There have been years in the past, when we hid the eggs as many as 3 separate times. 🙂
The kids loved the novelty of getting money in their eggs, especially since they are starting to save for bigger purchases. I will have to up the amounts gradually as they get older, but it could be the start of a fun, new tradition. That evening we passed out Conference Bingo pages to the kids and watched the Saturday morning session of General Conference as a a family. It was so nice to be able to concentrate on the talks while the kids quietly listened to what the speakers were saying, hoping to hear one of their bingo words. We have tried other conference packets in the past, with varying degrees of success. Yes, it kept the kids entertained for a session or two, but they weren't paying much attention to what was being said, and they were talking so much amongst themselves about the different activities in their packets, we had to continually shush them in order to hear the talks ourselves. So not ideal. This Conference Bingo had a completely different effect on them, and even Noah sat and listened to conference the whole time. So, so, so nice! In fact, I would call it a miracle!