Easter

Hope you all had a lovely Easter! Ours was low key but pretty darn good. It was actually a weekend of egg-cellent fun: (click to make larger)

After a conversation with a fellow mom at archery on Thursday, I decided to make our egg hunts this year a bit more interesting (particularly as the boys seem to be outgrowing them anyhow, even though I found them earlier this week hiding rocks in the back yard to "practice" LOL). So. We normally just hide empty plastic eggs. The boys like hiding and finding them...all good. This year, though, I put various supplies in plastic eggs...ten different types of supplies. I then numbered those eggs 1 through 10 and made up four sets (we had a friend over Saturday and opted to do this all then instead of Sunday). The boys had to find only one set of eggs (so couldn't, for example, have two number 5 eggs).

That took a little longer than anticipated and we never did find one of the number 9 eggs. ;)

Then we took everything inside and had the boys open the eggs. Their expressions were pretty good as they discovered miscellaneous "stuff"...here's a list:

a shuttlecock
a small carabiner
rubber bands
paper clips
string
pipe cleaners
knee high pantyhose
cotton balls
a trash bag
balloons

I then let them know that they each had to use what they had to create an egg drop contraption (I also allowed the use of scissors and tape). They set to work and had great fun! Once everyone was mostly ready, we headed outside where Nathan had set up the ladder over the garage...about a 16 foot drop. We did test runs with hard boiled eggs then allowed any tweaking. Then, we dropped 'em with raw eggs!

Micah and Asher's eggs came out unscathed. Noah and his friend's...not so much. ;) (Noah would want me to insert here that he initially came up with an entirely different contraption based on the idea of lowering the egg to a foot off the ground and then dropping it (as demonstrated by Jamie on Mythbusters)...only to discover that we were dropping the eggs from considerably higher than his string reached. So, he hastily built an alternate and knew it wouldn't hold. He'd also point out that Asher and Micah received a wee bit of parental assistance, lol.)

Still. We all had a blast! :)

After using our contraptions, we decided to have even more fun and managed to get an egg inside a balloon and then filled the balloon with water and dropped it...just to see. ;) Yup, it splatters as one would expect. ;) 

That upper left photo was actually still on Saturday...managed to get in some time at the archery range and finish off the experiment portion of Asher's Options science fair project. (Yay! and whew for having that out of the way, lol!)

On Easter, we continued our egg theme with egg & spoon races...which ended after a frustrated Micah threw his egg, cracking it open...and then my brother collected the hard boiled yolk and bounced it off of Noah's head, which led to much laughter. 

Meanwhile, Micah went back inside for his pantyhose. (He is oddly taken with them and finds them very comfortable. On Saturday he tried getting them over his head but mostly has been now wearing them on his hands/arms. I don't know why.)

And then the boys and my niece all played frisbee in the front yard for a good while, enjoying the gorgeous day.

And that was our Easter. ;) (I'm really happy with how my new take on egg hunts went and hope to continue the tradition next year!)