Easter Weekend {2012}

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Easter Weekend! We certainly did. And we managed to pack a lot of activity into the few short days. Highlights included visiting the Minnesota Zoo to check out the Baby Farm Animals Exhibit, dying and decorating Easter eggs, and of course the excitement of multiple egg hunts. There was of course some yard work to undertake as well—thanks to our early and unusually warm spring. And Easter Services late into the night on Saturday. But it all combined to make a weekend that was wonderful and exhausting, all at once. Kind of like life these days.

The trip to the Zoo was basically a mini-marathon for the little man. He literally ran the whole way through the Zoo to the Baby Farm Animal exhibit, bypassing most of the animals and only stopping for a playground or two. That’s a lot of running for short little legs.

But once we made it to the Farm Animal Exhibit, the little man finally showed interest in the animals—with the goats and the pigs being his favorites.

The hubs thought I was crazy to want to dye eggs with our little man, who is 22-months old today. He figured that he would be totally uninterested. Not to mention that the combination of toddlers and fragile objects is typically not the best of ideas. But luckily for me, the whole activity was a pretty big success.

There may have been a bit of incidental dye consumption, as the glasses of colored liquid happened to look a bit like juice. And I did use our drinking glasses, which seemed to add to the confusion.

But overall, the whole activity was a major hit and ended up being less of a mess than I had expected. The little guy was really into the experience and I don’t think that we had any severe egg-casualties.

Since it was cold out on Easter morning, we decided to hold our egg hunt indoors. The eggs had been hidden in a few areas of main level. Mostly in view, to keep the difficulty level low for our one-year old.

We had to prompt the finding of the first few. But after that, it was game on and the little man pretty much managed to find the rest on his own.

Every time he would find an egg, he would look at us and hopefully ask if there were more. We almost thought about re-hiding them all for him to find again. But his less than gentle handling of the eggs when placing them in the basket, made us decide that it wasn’t best to push our luck.

All in all, the eggs didn’t actually fare too badly. There were a few that got crushed between little fingers. And others that the little man tried to eat, shell and all. So maybe plastic or wooden eggs would have been a better call. But real eggs certainly were not a disaster. And I wouldn’t necessarily discourage any parent of a toddler not to use real eggs. Regardless, we held our egg hunt later that day outside, when we were at my parent’s house. Just in case.

And the only egg that didn’t survive that hunt, was the one that the dog made off with! Go figure.

And that pretty much sums up our wonderful Easter weekend. Tell me, how was your weekend? Was it relaxing? Did anyone else risk the combination of toddler and real eggs?