As an important part of any good upbringing, our kids are well-versed in the Chocolate holidays: Easter, Halloween, Labour Day (doesn’t everyone celebrate that one with chocolate union cards? huh). Anyway, as anyone knows, the very best part of the Easter Chocolate holiday is the finding of treats that have been hidden around the house. It’s way better than Halloween in that sense, since you don’t have to go and beg for your stuff from strangers with bags of candy, which on any other day of the year is a sure jail sentence for anyone trying to give other people’s kids candy, but I digress.
Our kids LOVE the Easter egg hunts, which if I do say so have been awesome in the past. Since the kids could all read we have er, The Bunny has left a very detailed note with riddles about the location of some of the things to be found around the house. The Bunny has good writers that can really be creative, one of them is called something that rhymes with Tricky and boy can she write a poem. Anyway, as the years passed we realized that the kids may need something a bit more challenging to maintain the fun, so I had a call with The Bunny and we decided that we would take the show on the road so to speak and hide things outside the house. At first this was modest, since the kids were young. I used a free app on my iPhone (which I had AT THE TIME, long before I saw the light, or rather the Lumia 920 that I really, honestly love more than I ever did my iPhone)** to get the GPS coordinates of where I was hiding the goodies, and then the kids could use the app to find the goodies again. It ends up being a simple compass and distance display for them, but of course anyone who has used a compass to navigate before knows that’s it’s rarely that easy, and it’s not perfectly accurate, so there is still at least a little bit of looking required. The hiding area became the green space behind the house. The kids loved it, it was way too much fun.
This year, since we had a newly licensed driver in the house, it was time to take it up a notch and the whole city of Kanata became part of the egg hunt, which was both hilarious and so much fun. Obviously Jordy couldn’t navigate and drive at the same time, so the boys took turns giving directions. Needless to say it was a good thing that it was early and there weren’t many folks on the road, as there was much sudden changing of direction. The first stop on the Eastercache was by a stunning serendipitous coincidence Starbucks, which was so handy, as Nik and I dearly needed a huge coffee…. Jordy wasn’t COMPLETELY jazzed by having the handsome barista hand her the bag of Easter goodies from behind the counter, but whatareyagonnado?
It’s price you pay for having absolutely cornball parents I guess. Maybe next year I can cook up a map of the GPS coordinates we used for you folks to laugh at.
** Update to clarify that I was using an iPhone 3G to do this years ago, just before “Thinking Different” became a joke.