Easter fun

Once again we went to the Deltona Eggstravaganza with Will's family to participate in their Easter egg hunt, which honestly is more of an Easter egg GRAB since they just have a bazillion eggs on a soccer field and the kids dash in and try to grab as many as they can. They had so many eggs this year, it was kind of ridiculous. Emily and Bailey each packed a bucket and could have gotten more if there was somewhere to put them. I got to supervise Emmy and Will took Bailey to her field (they divide the kids up by age groups, which is a really good idea). It was neat to watch Emily; she ran onto the field and picked up one egg, ignoring the other thousand in that square foot of grass. Then she ran off to another spot and did the same thing! So cute! Will said Bailey was really into it, too, once she realized what she was supposed to do.  This is the best picture we got of all of the kids:

After filling their buckets, the kids had to open every egg to see if any of them had a ticket inside, which meant that they'd won a prize.  I think last year Xander got two prizes, and Derrick and Emily each got one, but this year only Bailey won a prize.  Will took her off to the prize tent to get it, but they came back empty handed: he said the girl at the tent explained that they didn't actually HAVE all of the prizes yet and she took down our name and number (and called us a few days later so I could go get Bailey's prize, which ended up being a stuffed pink chick.  Emily loves it.  Bailey couldn't care less.).

Of course the big to-do was yesterday, on Easter, when we had our own egg hunt at home.  A few weeks ago I told Will that I didn't want the emphasis to be on candy this year, since we don't really give the kids a lot of candy (which means we'll eat it--hah!!).  So the Easter Bunny made lovely baskets with other wonderful things inside: stickers, a special DVD each, books, and a chocolate bunny.  The Easter Bunny also read a great idea in a magazine recently, which was to buy a puzzle and put a piece in each egg, and then when the children find the eggs they get to put the puzzle together.  Well the EB really liked that idea, so a puzzle was purchased, but the pieces did not fit inside the eggs.  And then the EB's husband said that he wanted the kids to have LOTS of eggs to find, and proceeded to go to Walgreens and buy copious amounts of jelly beans, gummy bears, airheads, m&ms, chocolate coins, and the like, which he then stuffed into approximately 234979273 eggs.  Then hiding places had to be found for all of those eggs, and when all was said and done, Emily and Bailey ended up with TONS of candy!!  And, later that day at Mimi and Grandpa's house, MORE candy was acquired as the Easter Bunny apparently visited there as well, and Aunt Christin and Uncle Ryan also brought buckets of candy for the kids.  So needless to say, the "non-emphasis on candy" rule was thoroughly ignored.

On another note, the girls looked so beautiful in their Easter dresses, which for the second year in a row came to us from our dear friends the Kuhn family.  Mommy also got a new dress (not borrowed, though), and Emily declared her "very pretty."