Easter with kids...

It was my turn to have the children for Easter this year. I love celebrating the holidays with the children. I unpack all the old family traditions from when they were children and conscript even the coolest of teens in the whole business.

This year we decided to invite some friends over to join in the festivities. On Saturday night we decorated Easter eggs. We dyed them various colours,( a little food colouring with vinegar and water will do the trick) and created over 30 little egg people, complete with googlie eyes, glitter, wooly hair and so on. The occasional egg couldn't handle the pressure and collapsed, but all in all we all had a lot of fun. Who would have thought 17 year old boys could get so into decorating hens eggs? My son, D, was a little too cool for it all, but he did decorate one egg nicely, scribbled a face on another and wrote on the third, "I'm rolling, I'm rolling," by then his creative juices had run out and the siren call of computer games had become too much to resist. 

On Easter Sunday, the children woke up to homemade Easter Baskets with a few eggs in each. ( please don't think Martha Stewart here- picture ice-cream tubs with ribbon around them.) We got up and got dressed for church. Following church we came home and started the Easter Dinner preparations. This year it would be gammon, cherries and pine adornments and a sprinkling of breadcrumbs. This was served with mash and veggies. 

The Chocolate thieving hounds had to be banished inside while I got ready for the egg hunt - I was very pleased to have found some camouflage eggs from Woolies this year, just to up the anti a little. They were coloured the colour of grass, tree and cement and were very hard to detect.( The grass ones worked particularly well in our hippy-like lawn! ) Perfect! Eventually the children were released and the dogs saw the gap  and escaped - their swift work of the children's chocolate advent calenders was still fresh on my mind and I raced inside to find two large bones from Easter dinner to distract them. It worked quite well. The children made quick work of finding the eggs and then went about dividing their loot evenly. I thanked my lucky stars for instituting this team based approach very early in their lives.

After the egg hunt, we got everyone ready for the annual Easter egg rolling event with all our decorated eggs. Plenty of our decorating friends had decided that they wanted to join in and so the van was groaning with kids ( about 13) squashed into it's limited space. We headed out for the large sand dunes of Bonza Bay. We looked for a really tall and steep dune and trekked that way.

A line was drawn at the bottom, this would be our rudimentary finishing line. Each competitor was allowed three eggs to compete with. On go, the eggs were rolled down the hill. The winning egg was allowed to continue in the running. Some eggs just never made it down the hill... some"inadvertently" landed on other competitors ... and some were launched like surface to air missiles in defense of an invisible, yet all the more menacing, air raid. Mayhem and chaos would be the official cover - up understatement, but they all seemed to have great fun and good naturedly handled being on the receiving end of the heat seeking egg shaped missile...

When it was all over, the children went off to wait at the van. I was a little slower than them as I was a little more fastidious in the mop up operation...one terrorist had saved his egg and snuck up on the others while they waited for me to unlock the car in the parking lot, without warning the last of the eggs was launched at the unsuspecting huddle which dispersed rather swiftly...

The evening was spent with friends playing board games and some outdoor games. That is my Easter story.