The Easter Egg Hunt

Easter has always been one of my favorite holidays. Not only does it celebrate Jesus Christ, his resurrection, and the renewal of life, but we have some fun traditions associated with it. Every year since I can remember, my family has had an easter egg hunt. The "Easter Bunny" would come and scatter plastic eggs filled with candy all across our yard and we would excitedly race out there with our pink baskets that my mom had made and raced around the yard to find the eggs. We have this home movie where I was honestly trying to help little 2 year old Sarah to find some eggs, pointing them out to her and helping them get put into her basket. I really was trying to help but my parents thought it would be best if Sarah learned on her own to get the eggs so then I went into the self-interest cycle to get the most. I did, for awhile, have to leave the super obvious and accessible ones for her though, but eventually we all grew up and the competitive nature kicked in. Even as adults, we still every year have the egg hunt. My sister Sarah is the only one close to home right now and she had her own egg hunt with my parents last Saturday. I have done this as well with my friends wherever I have been.

And this year was no exception. We even had TWO egg hunts. We had a very small one for our Sunday School class where at the end of the lesson, we sent them outside while we hid some eggs around the room. William thought that some might have run off, but all of them stayed and very quickly found an egg (Hey, its a small room). It was fun to see them search around and then trade for the different types of candy that they wanted.

We were going to do an egg hunt all by ourselves (pretty pathetic) but FORTUNATELY, our friends Dyan and Lars saved us by inviting us and several other couples over for dinner. We got quite excited for this egg hunt and filled 133 plastic eggs with a wide assortment of treats- Starburst jelly beans, M&Ms, 3 different kinds of Reese's Peanut Butter candies, Reese's Pieces (can you tell that we like peanut butter and chocolate :-), Snickers, Twix, Sweettart candies. Yeah, all the good stuff.

We had a DELICIOUS dinner before the hunt to give us energy. Dyan and Lars made a ham with this fabulous glaze (and I'm glad that I remembered something from watching my extended family carve up the ham:-), asparagus, strawberry/candied almonds spinach salad, AND homemade strawberry ice cream. Maren and Ryan brought a very flavorful quiche (you can tell it was delicious in that it was all gone), Rachel and Scott brought some fresh fruit, and William and I brought cinnamon rolls.

This is the first time that I have made cinnamon rolls before so I was quite nervous about how they would turn out. I researched online and in the cookbooks that I have for the best recipe and found two good options. One looked amazing but it was all from scratch and had to go through THREE rise cycles. This was NOT going to work when we get out of church at 1 and have dinner at 2:30. So, I went with the "semi-homemade" version where I got a quick rise rolls mix (with yeast) that said it could be either normal rolls or cinnamon rolls and then did this DELICIOUS filling and frosting from the Food Network's site. I am always nervous when I try a recipe for the first time, especially when I am making it for other people to eat, just because I hate to mess it up and embarrass myself for my ineptitude for cooking. I was quite worried because the box said that it only needed to rise for 30 mins and that the rolls would "double in size". I turned on our oven and placed the rolls on top so they would have a warm place but after the 30 minutes, they weren't doubled and worse, they weren't even close to one another. I was freaking out because cinnamon rolls are supposed to touch each other- that's what makes them taste so good. BUT, to my utter relief, they perfectly raised while baking. And here is the final product.

They were SO GOOD! Even better than I had expected. I feel kind of bad because after we left, William was laughing at me for "tooting my own horn" so much and for raving out loud just how good they were. I didn't mean to do that- I was just SO EXCITED that they turned out! And we even had one and a half left to take home (which we have already eaten). I highly recommend these rolls, especially for being in a hurry.

Dyan is so cute- she is such a little Rachael Ray/Martha Stewart in that she created all of these different dishes, dressed the table so nicely, and even had little gift boxes for us to take home.

Here are Ryan, Maren, and Leah all enjoying the food.

Leah is going to be America's Next Top Model. At 1 years old, she already LOVES the camera and has her poses down already. There's her "Maverick" face.

And this is my favorite little guy, Tyler. I totally think that with this shot, he could be on the cover of GQ Baby.

And I just realized that I didn't get a photo of our other adorable baby Nora :-( She's just as cute, she was taking a nap for the photo shoot though.

Then, it was the time everyone had waited for- the EGG HUNT. William and I went outside and hid them in this triangle patch of grass, trees, shrubbery in front of the apartment complexes. There were a limited number of "difficult" spots so then we had to place them in very obvious, visible places. Since William and I hid them, we thought it was fun to follow the others and see if they found the difficult ones or not.

Here's Maren off to a racing start with our ever-so glamorous "baskets"

And Rachel with the William high reach.

A few of my favorite moments of the egg hunt: Rachel was so into the egg hunt and for her Scott winning that she let Tyler nearly crawl into the parking lot (Don't worry- I always look out for my little guy), Lars shaking one of the bushes of the giant shrub and announcing "No more eggs here" when one was actually right in front of him, and, my personal favorite- the last egg- literally just lying here in the middle of the field. I guess everyone was looking for the ones in other difficult places.

Tyler was such a great helper putting the eggs into the basket

And Leah was just so happy with an empty egg- no candy inside necessary for her

And somehow, in true spirit of Easter, a miracle similar to the loaves and the fishes happened . . . we ended up with more eggs than we started with! 135 . . . maybe the in-our-head addition was off, but I thought that it was in the true spirit of the holiday.

The moment everyone has been waiting for- the winners of the challenge among the couples- LARS AND DYAN! And how could such a cute couple not have one (I think that they also had the advantage of Nora being asleep :-)

Thanks for being such great friends and for helping us maintain my favorite Easter tradition!