easter party preps

Even though our easter egg hunt was two weeks ago, I am still trying to get caught up on previous activities.  Because I'm weird like that.  Because I'm chronologically wired.  So I can't post what we did yesterday because I haven't posted two weeks ago.  

And plus, if my computer ever crashes again (though I have learned my back-up lesson) and the world ever comes to an end and all my pictures are gone, I know that blogger will save them for me.  Forever.  To infinity and beyond.  So I shall continue to post my previous pictures.  You know, in case the world comes to an end.  

I was excited about our 2nd big easter egg party, in large part because last year's was so fun.  Like last year, we planned it this year to be several days before easter, so there was no mixing of ideas...you know, the whole easter egg vs. resurrection competition for the hearts of young kids...or something like that.  Plus, logistically, it's much easier to have party time seperate from w.rship time.

Anyway, this year in keeping with easter egg traditions from josh's side of the family, I decided to have prize eggs - plastic eggs that had numbers inside them, which corresponded to prizes that could be redeemed after the hunt was over.  I also added special name eggs this year: if a child found their name egg, they could get a special prize.  (This was motivated to make sure that each child got a prize - mixing big kids and little kids sometimes results in unequal prize distribution!)

Here are the name eggs:

(these were so easy to decorate!  I poured glitter into a small bowl and put those round double sided scrapbook stickers on the eggs.  Then I rolled them in the glitter and they turned out really cute!)

The prizes:
The day before our easter party there was a slight mishap with the easter cake I was making.  I'll save you all the details, but it was irrepairable.  I thought and thought about what to do...and I remembered an idea from The Pioneer Woman's website.

I sent my house helper to run to the flower market and buy 20 small flower pots.  We washed them, washed them again, and then washed them again.  Then I lined them with foil because I still wasn't convinced of their cleanliness.
Then I crumbled up the few parts of cake that weren't already crumbled and put them in the flower pots.
I took green straws - because every mom of preschoolers has multi-colored straws in the pantry, right?! haha - and cut them in half:
...then stuck them in the pots.
In another bowl, I mixed cream cheese, whipping cream, sugar, and fresh sliced strawberries:
I spread that over the crumbled cake, then sprinkled graham cracker crumbs on top.  A fresh bouquet of flowers got trimmed and divided between the flower pots.  The end result looked like this:
They all turned out really cute.  They were springy.  They were fun.  But they were supremely time consuming and I will never do it again!  The Pioneer Woman conveniently left that part out of her description...

Actual easter egg hunt pictures to come...and much more...