The Egg Tradition

Things are back to normal this week. Well, as close to normal as things can be in our house.

But we're all home and that's always nice.

Liz had a fabulous time with my mom in Goshen and got to see her great Grandma and Grandpa as well as my dad, her Papaw. Apparently, Liz completed multiple Easter egg hunts daily at my mom's house.

One wasn't enough for her.

Once she got the hang of it, she enjoyed setting up the egg hunts herself. She would hide them and then scurry around the yard and find them. She clearly inherits the family gene.

For years, on my side of the family we had Easter egg hunts until my cousins and I were well into our late-teens. OK. We were in our early 20s - maybe even middle 20s.

All right. I admit it - the hunts just ended 3 or 4 years ago - shortly before the little ones were born. But Easter egg hunts have always been a big deal in my family.

It's not enough to simply show up and run around looking for eggs. You need to prepare for the hunt. You must make sure you're wearing the right type of shoes, comfortable pants and certainly you don't want any restrictive clothing that will prohibit you from leaping off decks to grab eggs.

Also, few of you (except my cousins who read this blog) have a grandma who's clever enough to drill holes into the plastic eggs and tie wire to them. If anyone thinks I'm joking about this, I know there are readers who can confirm this.

Yes, Grandma Shidler decided the egg hunts needed to be more challenging. So, she actually had Grandpa drill tiny holds into the plastic eggs and then tied wires to them. Then, she took the wire pieces and wrapped them around the hiding places - such as branches, etc...

As you can imagine, these hunts were lengthy and quite intricate. You were trying to find the eggs while untwisting that wire as fast as possible. It certainly lasted a lot longer than those little egg hunts you see at local parks.

I also must admit that I was traditionally the family loser. Yes, last place had my name written all over it, and I was pretty proud of those 3 eggs....every year. Sometimes, I even got four. Well, maybe that was just one year.

Until that one year, when Grandma Shidler urged me to get a move on it. I took her advice.

That was the year of my "infamous deer leap off the deck," as I plunged off the deck diving for the eggs, and somehow managed to land gracefully (for the first time in my life) grabbing every egg in sight.

Ok. Not every egg. I'm still pretty sure I came in the lower percentile that year, but I would say if we looked back at the family stats, I made a remarkable improvement.

Based on Liz's ongoing excitement for egg hunts, I think she's carrying on that egg tradition.