$#@!% Easter Egg Hunt

Last Sunday, Scott and I attempted to throw a big shin-dig for the English department students. We had prepared a little more than a hundred eggs (real and plastic) for an Easter egg hunt, brought balloons and decorations and prepared lots of fun games. I also prepared a bunch of banana muffins as a gift!

We played a game with balloons first: sit on and pop as many balloons as you can. But there were children in the garden who kept stealing the balloons! I finally marched up to these children (who weren't being chastised by their parents) and said "These are NOT yours. Don't pick them up!) but they didn't obey me. I guess I should practice the language in an angry voice.
Then we played a three-legged race, which was hilarious.
The whole time I was conducting these games with the students, Scott was at the soccer field, hiding all the Easter eggs. He was half-way done when he realized that 3 kids were going behind him and stealing the Easter eggs. He also noticed an old man going behind him with a trash bag, throwing all the eggs away.
You can imagine his frustration. He called me and told me "Quick! Let's start the egg hunt before the kids can steal any more!"
So I sent the students to recover what they could, but low and behold, hardly any of the plastic eggs had candy in them (the kids had gotten to it first) or the little notes telling the Easter story.
Sigh.

So, we very dejectedly returned to play some more games; Egg toss and Egg roll. We were running out of prizes really quickly... and I realized it was because some children had followed us back from the soccer field and had been sneaking into the prize bag. I made a very angry face at them and said "NOT ok" (all I could say). I also had to tell one of the teachers to stop giving away the plastic eggs to the random people in the park who weren't participating. (Even though I had said at the beginning of the games that we would like the eggs back so we can play again next year.) We probably recovered 1/3 of the eggs that we started with :-(

At the end, I handed out banana muffins to all the students and thanked them for coming. I had so many left over, I ended up giving 3 or 4 to all the people who were on lookers! The kids gobbled them up, but the adults were wary of this strange bread.

Next year we'll bring paddles to handle the egg stealers. I'm also going to learn how to say to parents: "Control your kids!" Haha!

Three good things came from this party.
1. Scott prepared some little booklets to pass out as presents (they contained Easter stories, traditions, and the real story), so maybe they will read them and...you know
2. My teacher told me that next year she would help make sure that the places we play games will be cleared of the riff-raff!
3. I had a good cry. If you go too long without one, you'll explode.

Oh well, you live you learn.