Easter Party, Burbach Style

(An excerpt from the online invitation) -

Hoppy Easter, Everybunny! We're resurrecting that party idea where we hide eggs and drink a bunch of mimosas and eat some ham and the next thing you know it's 8:00pm and I'm wondering why the hell you people are still in my yard. All are welcome: kids, grown-ups, semi-devout Methodists, non-denominational tree-huggers, Baptists who allow dancing, concerned Catholics who want to keep an eye on things, FLDS polygamous families (2-wife-maximum), Hindus with a thing for Bloody Marys, loosey-goosey Jews, recovering Pentecostals, escaped Scientologists, and committed Agnostics. Atheists can come, but they get no dessert.

Hey, y'all - 

We hosted our annual Easter party and brunch this year for 12 kids and 17 grown-ups. That comes out to about one person per square foot in our tiny house. 

We hid 150 eggs in our yard (filled with leftover spider rings from Halloween, shamrock tattoos from St Patrick's Day and candy from Christmas stockings).

To make it a little more sporting, we decided to give the littlest guys a 30-second head start:

...so the bigger kids had to wait on the deck and count to 30. The little guys were better egg finders than we thought they'd be, so the big kids' counting at the end became suspiciously FAST. twentysixtwentyseventwentyeighttwentyninethirty... 

Every year, my mama asks me why I don't take a beautiful Easter portrait of my children. See, in the south, Easter is a very dressy occasion. It's smocked dresses and monogrammed hair bows the size of a regulation football. It's sleeping in pink sponge rollers to get your curls just right. Here in Missoula, our style is a little more nouveau hillbilly. Hipster survivalist. Warm jackets and comfy shoes in case you get chased by a bear. 

But true to MY roots, I did fancy hair for Easter, because you can take the girl out of the Bible Belt, but you can't take the Bible Belt out of the girl. (My friends: "Are you going to Prom later?")

We had a smoked turkey, and I made hashbrown casserole and collard greens and deviled eggs and biscuits and cinnamon rolls and champagne punch. 

We set up tables in the yard and let the kids dye four dozen eggs. Hagen did ten himself, but did them in uniform solid colors only, because he is his father's child.

Because we have friends with older children, every year I come up with an alternate egg hunt for the big kids. This has honestly become my favorite part of planning the Easter party. Last year, I did a typical scavenger hunt with rhyming clues and the clue in one egg led to the clue in the next egg. I had eggs tied up in the tree, hidden at the bottom of the ice in the cooler and floating in the hot tub (at the last minute, your dad reminded me I should take the chocolate out of that one).

This year, I needed to go even bigger, so I devised a high-tech egg hunt. Each of the girls was instructed to bring her mom's smartphone:

Starting with that first letter, each clue had a QR code that they could scan with their phone. Each led to the next egg, which had another code hidden inside and so on...

Sometimes, the code linked to a video that they had to watch (Example: a YouTube link to the song "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time" led them to find the egg in my refrigerator behind the peanut butter and jelly.) Or sometimes, they would scan the code and see a really close-up picture of something in the house. They'd have to figure out what was in the picture and find it - clue eggs were hidden in my mailbox, the pocket of Laney's winter coat and the hot tub filter. 

At my most fiendish, I hid one code in the middle of our huge wall of family photos:

The girls LOVED it. It took them about half an hour to complete all the clues. Their prize at the final stop was a little bag of lip gloss and nail polish and candy.

True to tradition, guests were at our house 'til dinnertime, dancing on the deck, playing games in the yard, wearing Halloween jewelry and eating 6-month-old candy.

I can't tell you how much I love Easter with our friends.

Love,
Mom