Crayons, Coffee, and Christ: Easter: New and Improved Version!

You guys, the Easter egg hunt this year was SO - FLIPPING - AWESOME! It was a beautiful day, we had a HUGE turnout (a little too huge.... WAY more than we were expecting and had prepared for!) and the kids had an awesome time. We've started holding our egg hunt the Saturday before Easter, and this year we had 60 kids show up. Woo hoo!

Everyone started outside for the egg hunt. The hunt itself was especially awesome this year because we'd cleared a trail in the woods behind our church for the Haunted Trail in the fall, so we were able to use that same trail for the hunt! WAY easier than trying to stage a difficult egg hunt on the lawn where there are literally no natural places to hide anything. We continued with the very successful tradition of color-controlling our eggs: Each kid could find 1 of each of the 7 colors of eggs, plus any multi-colored eggs they found. (Allegedly, the multi-colored eggs were supposed to be more difficult to find... Not sure if that was actually true or not!) To help the kids keep on track with what they were looking for, each one got a book mark with the 7 colors listed.

What's inside the eggs, you ask? Well, since this is a church-sponsored event, I feel like I have to give this pretty secular tradition a Christ-centered spin. So, inside each egg, along with a small prize, was one paper egg with a letter on it. I used these gorgeous eggs from Simply Home Blog! Since I only had 7 eggs, though, a full set, when unscrambled, spelled out the words "JESUS IS." The kids were then asked to answer the question, "Who is Jesus to you?"

The prizes mostly came from Oriental Trading Company, and included: an Easter story finger puppet, a cross necklace, an Easter sticker, a "Jesus Loves You" bracelet, an eraser, and of course, some candy. Each of the multicolored eggs were stuffed full of candy!

Once the kids finished the hunt, there were helpers waiting at the finish line to usher them into the gym for activities! Our activities were as follows:

Regular egg dying (that is, egg dying with normal dye)

Egg dying using SHAVING CREAM - A huge hit, although not nearly as effective as regular egg dying. But did the kids care?! No way! They had a blast following these steps for shaving cream egg dyeing. We also had more kids take their eggs home this year because a very thoughtful Sunday School teacher had left us a cut-up egg carton for transport!