Easter Egg Hunt Help

Make Easter Egg-cellent for All Ages

• What: Easter egg hunt hints
• When: 12 months and up
• Why: Keep everyone happy
• Where: Your egg hunt

Have your kids gotten old enough to fight over Easter eggs? Count and compare who has the most? Cry for half an hour afterwards because they didn’t find the exact one they wanted, or their sibling got more of one type of filled egg than they did? Welcome to parenthood on Easter.

We had less drama during egg hunts with our younger kids. They all had similar abilities to locate eggs (or zero interest or idea of what was happening), and their counting skills didn’t go much beyond 10. Now that they’ve grown, the four year difference between the oldest and the youngest can make a big difference in shouts of joy or sorrow.

I finally caught on and started adjusting to their varying levels. If you, too, have multiple age groups, try some of these tricks to even the playing and finding field.

Section off different areas for different ages. Toddlers can have eggs randomly strewn about with no worries about the bigger kids scooping them all up before the little ones can waddle over. And the big kids will be busy actually hunting eggs in their area instead of grabbing any eggs that miss someone’s basket.

Separate by height. You can stick eggs out of reach of little ones, and make a rule that big kids can’t collect from the ground (or any other boundary you designate). This keeps eggs in everyone’s reach, and you can hide an equal number. Or if you want the hunt to last the same amount of time and don’t care about the final number of eggs, you can hide more for the older group or in tougher to find spots.

Color code eggs. If you don’t have enough room to do separate areas (or the energy to patrol the boundaries), assign colors to each age group. Little ones get pink and blue, five to seven year olds get green and yellow, and the oldest still desperate to participate and get the goods have purple and orange eggs. The colors for bigger kids can go in harder to find locations without the need to worry about any sort of boundaries.

Try one or all of the above to see what works for your family. Happy hunting!