a reason to have a party

I'm not a bad mom. Honestly. I really intended for Emma to have a little birthday party, with all five of her friends present. But this year, the timing just sort of worked out weirdly, with us getting back from thailand just a few days before her big three year old day...and then, after we had done out little family celebration, it seemed even weirder to bring up the birthday concept to emma a week or so later. So, aside from the very fun bday she had with her family, she had no BIG birthday party.

That fact, however, did not halt my intenal drive to find a reason to have a party. I confess, it's true. I like parties. I like having everyone over. I like setting my table with pretty tablecloths and fun napkins. I even sort of like all the chaos (maybe that comes from being in a big family!). So it didn't take me long to find an excuse to make up for the missing party.

Spring was on its way, though you might not know it by the confused Old Man Winter in our city. I thought it would be the perfect time to have a spring party and hunt easter eggs, since we already had a lot planned when Easter rolls around this year. It was decided. A spring party.

Step #1: Can I locate easter baskets? I was assuming I probably wouldn't find any cute easter-ish baskets, but if I even found baskets that were close, I was prepared to decorate them. I scored a serious jackpot! My trusty basket store down the street had perfect baskets that were begging to be easterfied. Bought: 8 baskets. Cost: $12. Next stop, the sells-everything-you-can-imagine market, where I was on the hunt for ribbon. Another big payday. I bought tons of ribbon, from polka-dotted pink to manly blue and khaki. Then it was time to see if I could pull off a real-looking easter basket. After a few nights of work, I produced 8 easter baskets that I was quite proud of. (only six are pictured here due to technical diffficulties.)

I enjoyed making them and the kids enjoyed choosing them, and later on, hunting with them.

Step #2: Dig up the plastic eggs that we had received from packages last year. [Thank you, grandparents, for sending plastic eggs!] Total count: 28. Total kids: 8. That worked out to 3.5 eggs per child, and so we filled those to the max with jelly beans, jolly ranchers and m&m's and tried to calculate how many eggs we would need to make in order for the kids to have plentiful-looking easter baskets. Plentiful was my goal.

Step #3: Make eggs. Or maybe, decorate eggs. I have never undertaken this task before and I honestly can't even remember any time in my childhood when we used anything other than plastic eggs. Perhaps I remember wrongly, but anyway, time has erased all traces of things other than candy. Rachel donated to the cause an easter egg dye kit she had received in a package a few years ago. I received it gladly (reference easter egg inferiority complex mentioned above). I initially thought the eggs turned out disastrous, but as they dried the prettied up a lot! They turned out to be too sticky for use in the Mass Egg Hunt (hereafter referred to as MEH), but they made a great centerpeice.

I then dusted off my trusty Joy of Cooking cookbook (which never actually collects much dust because it I use it much too frequently for that!) and of course, they did not let me down. Specific and easy instructions left me with 80 dyed eggs just a few hours later.

Step #4: Pull this thing off without looking like it was a seat-of-your-pants operation.

Everyone showed up for the big hunt around 10:15am - well, except for the daddies who arrived early to hide the eggs. I debated for a while about which media device I should take with me to record the grand event, and initially decided on my way-fab camera. But then, right as I heard the elevator "ding" to announce its arrival to take us downstairs, I changed my mind and rushed back inside to grab the video camera. My reasoning was that sometimes I will wait forever, camera in hand, for the perfect picture and end up not enjoying myself. But with a video camera, you can get our token 5 minutes of video and enjoy the rest of the time.

Good in theory, except MY STINKIN BATTERY RAN OUT AFTER 5 SECONDS! I was not happy with my video camera, or my decision to change my mind at the last minute. But anyway, rachel got some cute picutres of the actual MEH:

After everyone had collected most of the eggs (5 were still missing, if all our calculations were correct) we headed back to our house to check out the loot and eat lunch.

All the kiddos in a quiet moment before they were allowed to start digging in their baskets:

But it didn't last long! Candy and children everywhere...Samantha figured out that the eggs opened...

...and Emma figured out that jelly beans stick to your teeth!The last activity on the agenda was singing an easterfied version of the Hokey Pokey, about it being a bunny hop. The crazy lady in the blue shirt led the singing time; here is a picture of everyone "putting their cotton tail in". Fun times.

So the moral of the story is that we had a super-fun spring party. There was so much laughter and wide-eyed childlike delight that I felt like a smile was glued on my face most of the morning. If we'd had a big party for emma, I still likely would have done something like this, but not on quite such a big scale...but I'm so glad it worked out this way! The event made special memories for our girls, and even today emma mentioned to me, "Momma, I like having easter egg hunts!" I feel so glad and so thankful that we are able to do these fun, american cultural events with our kids. So, if you've ever wanted to send us things but didn't know what to send, at the end of your favorite holiday, buy up the clearance aisle and send us what you find!