Saturday we hosted our annual Academy Easter Egg Hunt, and despite the heavy winds, it was a great morning and all the kids had tons of fun. Siena even got to participate in her first egg hunt ever. Thanks to Nathan Ooms for backing off and letting her find some eggs. That was very kind of him and it made her day.
After our Easter Egg Hunt, I witnessed two other Egg Hunts that I just need to contrast to our well-disciplined and courteous egg hunt.
The first was directly following our egg hunt in Boulder. We went to get Siena’s hair cut for the first time and stumbled across a toy store’s egg hunt in their tiny concrete square outside their store. Coming right from our hunt in a nice, spacious park to this cramped quarters was striking.
You couldn’t really call this an egg hunt. It was more like an Easter Egg Scramble because all the eggs were just dumped into this concrete circle and all the kids were unleashed to shove and jostle to collect as many eggs as they could. It was a frenzy and had none of the FUN of exploring to find hidden Easter Eggs.
Dr. Karla and I were a bit repulsed and both said, in unison, “Siena’s never going to be a part of that.”
On Sunday — with the second Easter Egg Hunt Incident — It got worse!
I happened to catch a TV news report of an “Easter Egg Hunt Gone Wrong” in New Hampshire. Again, not really a hunt as much as a piranha-like feeding frenzy.
Hundreds of kids were in a field where eggs were dropped from helicopters. The best efforts of the organizers were to no avail in keeping the ravenous kids under control. They stormed the field, running each other over, knocking each other done in a mad dash fueled by pure “id” to collect more eggs than they could possibly ever need.
Of course the TV announcer was aghast at how this could happen, but as a martial arts teacher my first response was, “really, what else did you expect”? I sometimes joke that our kids are like locusts at our Easter Egg Hunt, but it’s a joke. Our SMAA kids were the pinnacle of restraint and just plain NICE as they searched for eggs, even going so far as to help others who didn’t have many eggs find more eggs.
These kids, in such overwhelmingly large numbers, really were like locusts. File that Easter Egg Riot under “you had to see it to believe it.”
This Easter tale has one last component. Sunday morning Siena, now 2, had her first Easter Egg Hunt at home. On Saturday we colored eggs with her, an event in itself. Watching her face as she helped dunk eggs and see them change color was priceless, as any parent would know. As fun as that was, guiding her to find the eggs the Easter Bunny had hidden was better. Seeing her scan the house, then spot an egg on the ledge, then exclaim, “there’s one!”— MAGICAL.
Some things are better in small numbers.