It usually takes a few hours to fill the 1,000 brightly colored plastic eggs that we hide in the yard each Easter- we count them as we fill them so we know about how many we hide each year. My mom and older brothers and sisters start filling the eggs after the little kids go to bed, and we’re usually up quite late- sometimes some interesting things end up in some of the eggs, or unusual things are done to them by my brothers, unknown to the rest of us until they are opened. Duct-taped eggs, real eggs in eggs, and messages in eggs declaring “You have been bad, no candy for you,” are their usual stand-bys.

Even though we have a really big yard-including two barns, a garage, a playhouse and a treehouse-quite a few of the eggs don’t end up actually “hidden” as much as they are just spread around. At 1 a.m. when you are out in the cold hiding eggs, sometimes in the snow, your first concern is not usually how difficult it should be to find the eggs in the morning. At that point, all the eggs are filled and the only thing separating you from your nice warm bed is how long it takes to get rid of the bags of eggs you have left.

In the morning, no one is allowed to find eggs until after church- and after we change out of our nice Easter Sunday clothes. Church ends around noon, so we don’t get around to collecting eggs until after one usually, because you can’t just go to Easter Sunday church and leave. You have to talk to everyone about your Easter plans and comment on how cute everyone is, and “Have a Blessed Easter,” etc. When I was younger, this was very excruciating. You could visibly see eggs strewn hap-hazardly around the lawn on the way to church...how were you supposed to focus on a priest when a thousand brightly colored treasures awaited in the yard at home?

Sometimes a few college students join us for the Easter egg hunt and Easter dinner- those who don’t go home for the holiday, or can’t because they live too far away. Most of them are usually Japanese foreign exchange students from FU, who have never celebrated Easter and never collected eggs. I imagine for them it’s a pretty amazing experience.

I never really thought about the fact that my mother was always inviting college students over on the holidays until I became one of the college students who no longer goes home for them. Holidays have always been pretty family-oriented for me, and now that I no longer have that, I realize how much I took it for granted.

But I digress...back to ‘the hunt.’ After church, we change out of our Sunday dress and everyone scatters throughout the yard collecting various sizes of brightly colored plastic eggs. When my younger siblings were in the under-7 age range, the oldest siblings would pair up with the youngest ones, holding a bag for them while they ran wildly around the yard, sometimes throwing the eggs in the bag, sometimes opening them right on the spot.

While collecting eggs we are also constantly on the lookout for our Easter baskets. My grandmother made each of us a basket when we were little, and, as my mom popped out more kids, I guess she kept my grandma busy making more baskets. They’re made out of fabric and we each have a different color...except the youngest ones- while mine is just pink, my sister Becca has a pink one with white lace. I guess my grandma ran out of colors. Eight kids, after all, is quite a few.

While the eggs may be scattered across the yard, the Easter baskets are never in plain view. They are usually in plastic Ziplocs or, if they don’t fit in those, covered in plastic wrap, so they won’t get wet from the snow. Whether attached to the roof of the barn, tied to the top of a tree or discreetly disguised among the rocks near the pond, you actually have to search for your basket. And, if you are an older sibling, once you find it, chances are you are going to have to devise a way to actually get to it.

After we’ve found all the eggs we could find and searched our hardest for our baskets, we return to the living room where my mom has put several blue Rubbermaid 20-gallon tubs, and has ziploc bags for each child to hold all their money and candy from the eggs.

As we open and empty each egg we count, the older children again helping the younger, and report our final egg count, usually discovering we have over 100 eggs still hidden somewhere in the yard. While we usually find a majority of them within the next week, sometimes we will come across a stray egg or two during the summer containing the usual coins or melted chocolate.

Once the hunt is done, our candy-consumption is limited, or at least my mom tries to restrict it, because Easter dinner is only a few hours away. The tubs of empty eggs are then quietly brought down to the basement to await the next Easter hunt.

------- In other news, my mom rocks because she sent me TWO boxes of stuff for Easter:) My bookshelf is now officially a toyshelf. The toys far outnumbered the books anyway!