How did/does/will your family...
barnwife
member
keep Easter egg hunts fair? That is, how do you prevent one child from ending up with tons of things while another only gets one or two?
We are hosting Easter for our families this year, and this could be a problem. In my family, dyed harboiled eggs are up for grabs. That is, you can collect as many as your can. Everything else (eggs filled with candy, chocolate rabbits, other small gifts) is labeled with a child's name. You can't pick it up or move it or tell them where it is.
DH's family...well, they don't have a system like that. And I/we are slightly worried about how the egg hunt will go. They tend to like chaos. At Christmas, everyone opened gifts at once. The kids just randomly grabbed gifts. No one paid attention to whether the gifts were actually to that child or not.
It drove me nuts!
DH agrees that since I am doing the egg hunt, I should do what I want. Especially because his family doesn't really have egg hunt traditions. But he isn't sure his family will go for the labeling things with a name. (That is, they won't enforce it. Or help the young ones who can't read.)
Any ideas?
Re: How did/does/will your family...
Miles (6 year old Maine C00n mix), Boots (5 year old Lab mix), Darla (4 year old GSD/Collie mix), Frankie (1.5 year old DSH mix), Peanut (15 months old - 09/11), and Bean (arriving Feb 2013).
I love that idea of the names!!!
Last year was the first with all kids with DH's family. It was chaos. BUT, when they were all collected, the kids split up the plastic eggs.
You could also just have the hard boiled eggs in the hunt and leave the plastic filled ones for baskets, so you can split them up....
Maybe to make the hunt more fun have a "Golden Egg" (my dad used to do this one every year...dye one and only one bright yellow) and who ever finds the Golden Egg wins something else...maybe a few extra plastic eggs or a chocolate easter bunny, or a stuffed animal. You get the idea.
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OH!!! I like that idea!!!
You could make all the kids (well not sure if you really want to do that...not sure how many kids there are!) shirts, like a plain shirt with a color appliqu?d of some sort. And they can only get the eggs that match their appliqu?d color!
That way you can give all the kids shirts for easter and keep everything even. Win-Win!
One big family I know breaks thing up by age. In other words, the littlest kids go first, then after they've had a minute or two, another batch of the next age starts, and so on. That way, the youngest have an opportunity to find the easier eggs before the older/quicker ones start.
Another family I know pairs up older kids with younger ones, and they have to hold hands the whole time (I think only kids do the hunt), so the older ones help the younger ones and it's arranged to make things more even.
I have 9 1st cousins. They each have 1-5 kids, not counting stepchildren. If the egg doesn't have your name on it, you don't pick it up. You go find that cousin and tell them that for the right price you know where their egg is.
My aunt has 2 garbage bags FULL of plastic eggs. There are some that have been around so long that they have 4 names on them, scratched out. Also, we all had a golden egg with a lottery ticket. Ooh. And some of our eggs had quarters. We made out like bandits at Easter.
I definitely agree that you should organize something or it will probably go to hell in a handbasket. I know our Easters would have had very unhappy endings without The System.
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this is what we did growing up and it worked great - we also each had one special big egg with our name on it to find that had some sort of special treat and $1....
My IL's hide change & candy in plastic eggs. Once everyone has finished hunting, the goods are counted. PawPaw then goes around giving change to even things out, and MawMaw does the same with candy. lol
Generally the kids then ask the adults to again hide the eggs (empty) so they can continue to hunt. After that, my FIL hides the eggs for the adults ... and that one is an all out brawl. lol
For us, there were different sized eggs. Smaller eggs for older kids in tougher hiding places, big eggs for younger kids in easy hiding places. No candy in eggs- just puzzle pieces- all the kids have to work together to find the eggs and then put together the puzzle.
Then, you open up all the eggs and put together the puzzle that has a rhyme/riddle to get you to the easter baskets. Each kid gets their own easter basket.
We did this last year with all of my cousins kids and DS. It went really well and there were 8/9 kids ranging from not quite 2 - 10
I can only think of two things. You could do the labeling thing but not with names. Like Sarah has to find the egg with a cow sticker, Logan gets Spiderman, etc. You could do stickers for things you know they like (animals, licensed characters, etc). You could also do that but instead of stickers you could do colors (Sarah gets the yellow egg, Logan gets green).
Or you could have each kid find an egg then come back to open it and show the adults what they found. The group of kids couldn't go back for egg #2 until all kids have found 1.
My brother and I always got along so we never encountered this. If one of us had more than the other we would just help each other. It's kind of sad that their parents aren't teaching them how to be considerate of others. I get that kids are excited but you could walk with him or her and help him "Look, Kyle. You have 4 whole eggs and Jenny only has 1. I bet she would feel warm and fuzzy inside if you helped her find another egg. Yay! Let's go help Jenny!" kwim?