One Acre Follies: Easter Fun in 2017 {and how to entertain a variety of ages}

We were missing part of our clan, but we managed to have a lot of fun celebrating Easter anyway. Our traditions are going to be harder and harder to hold on to with sports schedules and kids getting jobs, but I am determined! I don't care quite as much where we get together as long as we do it somewhere, but the girls really love having everyone here for "Easter Saturday" as we call it.

In past years we've had the egg hunt using plastic eggs filled with all sorts of things. Quarters, candy, stickers I think. We use very little candy as none of them need it and Kate can't have any of it. This year my sister had a good idea to use grapes and sugar free gum and I think someone chipped in a couple of $2.00 bills. We also have a set of Resurrection Eggs. If you aren't familiar with those, they are a set of plastic eggs that each contain something symbolizing the Easter Story. One contains a small rock for the stone that rolled away from the tomb, one has a rubber "sword", one has some "silver coins" representing the money paid to Judas, etc. I remember one or two years, my dad would use those to tell the Easter story. As they got older, we hid them along with the other eggs and when they all opened their eggs together whoever found the eggs told about that part of the story. This year, I completely forgot to give them to the dads to hide! They were even sitting in the kitchen. Oh well.

Usually, we don't really plan any other games or activities, the kids just play and do their thing. As they have gotten older though, I have noticed a lot of times they default to some sort of electronics and they also kind of split up, the boys going one way the girls the other and maybe someone getting left out who's not interested in either group and then is bored.

This year I was inspired by How To Celebrate Everything by Jenny Rosenstrach author of the blog Dinner a Love Story. This book is part cook book, part memoir and part pure inspiration! We filled a jar with jelly beans and as everyone arrived they wrote down there guesses as to how many were in there. This is how easy some of the games are that she suggests in the book. Yes, we had to count them the night before! Kate helped with that. Then we ate and did the egg hunt. They all like to open their eggs and trade each other and compare and all that. When they were finished with that we had an egg race where you race with a raw egg held in a spoon. That was fun. Then all of us participated in an egg toss. My mom and dad won that. I swear their egg was some kind of crazy hard egg. We (I) saved the "best" game for last. We had the kids get their empty baskets and we had a.......

DANDELION PICKING CONTEST! It was hilarious. My niece had even said, "What are you going to do, make us pick all your dandelions?" I about died laughing. Yep! That's about the gist of it. We set the timer for 1 1/2 minutes and whoever picked the most won. Jasmine was smart and just sat down in a spot and started grabbing. Other's made it a little harder on themselves. It was pretty funny to watch and they had fun. I was accused of making that up just to get them to "pick all the weeds", but I pointed out that if that was the only idea behind this game the timer would've been set for 10 minutes!! This game was not in the cookbook, by the way. This was my own pure genius! ;)

Everyone was laughing, no one was rolling their eyes, and no one was on an electronic device and everyone, from 70 years down to 11, had a good time.

It was totally worth the yellow stains on my white table cloth from all of the dandelion counting! I think I got it white again.