4/11/22 Journal: Easter Egg Hunt!

My wife Evi has put together an Easter Egg hunt in our backyard every year since Sasha was born. She once told me that she wants some kind of party that’s an annual event we’re known for. Like, how we spent three straight Thanksgivings at the Robinsons’, or three straight Christmas Eves at the Roos’s. I guess she wants people to automatically think of us around Easter time.

I’m totally okay with it.* Christmas, Thanksgiving, and most other holiday parties are significant events that usually last on into the night. An Easter Egg hunt is two hours of making sure little kids don’t kill each other, then it’s over. My kind of event.

*As if I have any say at all

Another benefit of this party is that I really don’t have to do anything. Evi is so particular about how everything looks and goes, she pretty much puts the entire thing together. She only gives me two jobs: hiding the Easter Eggs, and Director of Parking.

The parking gig was easy; I basically had to sit in a chair with my coffee and gesture halfheartedly at a spot on our lawn when a car came down our street. The eggs thing sucked. You’d think that would be fun; like, I could use some creativity in hiding them, right? Except Evi gave me a laundry basket filled with every plastic egg manufactured in the Western Hemisphere since 2008, and told me to hide them in our backyard.

So I did, as long you define the word ‘hide’ extremely loosely. Oh, at first I really tried. Hey, let’s put an egg behind this tree stump, they’ll have a tough time finding that! And here, behind the curbing, that’s another good spot! I did this for maybe fifteen minutes, then I noticed something: there were just as many eggs in my basket as when I started! I think there may have been more. I was making no progress!

Eventually, I started just whipping eggs everywhere. One right next to another one. A few right in the middle of the lawn. Three randomly tossed into a bush. Here, there, anywhere, just to get rid of these goddamn eggs. When I was done, you couldn’t take three steps in our lawn with tripping over an egg that was ‘hidden’.

It was all worth it, though, when everyone came and we experienced the annual Easter joy of watching children do nothing while their parents found their eggs for them.* Okay, that was just the young ones. The older children found their own eggs by the tried-and-true method of pushing each other out of the way like it was the Land Rush of 1889.

*One parent would take an egg, hand it to their very young daughter, she’d put it in her basket, then the parent would take the egg from the basket for the girl to find again.

In the end, the kids absolutely cleaned out all the eggs. We have tons of trees and bushes in our backyard, but they found every stinking egg, even the ones I hid ‘creatively’. That gave me an idea for another event Evi and I should host:

Bring Your Children and Join the Simmons Family for the First-Ever Annual 4th of July Garbage Hunt!

Come celebrate the birth of our country in our backyard while, um, helping the environment. ‘Murica! Prizes for the “Biggest Piece of Trash” and “Most Overall Garbage”! We recommend rubber gloves.

Hopefully, Evi will put it all together.

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