Easter Weekend

It's been a week since Easter and I think I've just about recovered from all the food we indulged in over the four day long weekend. It was the first time we've really celebrated Easter with Ella and I think she was pretty excited about the giant bunny coming to hide treats and eggs around our backyard. All weekend she kept asking if it was Sunday as Andy told her that was the day the Easter bunny comes. Here's an update of what we got up to all weekend.

On Good Friday my mom channelled her inner early childhood educator and did a craft project with Ella: a picture of Easter bunnies made from cotton wool. They spent over an hour working on it together. Ella is getting better and better at focusing for a long period of time on one thing.

That evening my friend Karen and her partner Adam came over for dinner and a bit of sport watching. Karen and I met in university - we lived across the hall from each other when I was in my first year.  She lives about a 15 minute drive from us so it has been great to reconnect with an old friend that is close by. Toronto’s hockey and basketball teams were both playing first-round playoff games, so it was a big night of sport in the city. We attempted to have dinner with them and Ella and Ollie but it was a bit hectic trying to host dinner with two kids. (There is a reason my parents have nicknamed dinner time "chaos hour".) Karen and Adam are expecting their first child in August, so hopefully seeing the dinnertime madness didn’t scare them off too much! 

Once the kids were in bed we were able to chill out and have actual conversations with our guests while watching the games. Both Toronto teams won so it was a great evening over all!

On Saturday I googled “things to do in the Toronto area today with kids” and discovered the many organised Easter egg hunts around the Toronto area. I signed Ella up for Canada’s Largest Easter Egg Hunt in the nearby town of Milton. It was raining but I dressed her up in her snowboarding pants and jacket and off we went. 

I’d never been to an organised Easter egg hunt before so wasn’t sure what to expect. This one was less of a hunt and more of a family team building event. The idea was to look through the 30,000 plastic eggs scattered in a huge field to find one with a rock inside (done by shaking the egg to see if there was anything in it). Upon finding an egg, you put it in a corresponding coloured bucket and then completed a team building activity with your family. There were 10 team building activities in total, so every time you found an egg with a rock in it you could do a different activity. At the end each family got a prize bag with chocolate eggs inside. It was a nice idea although the activities were a bit too hard for a three-year-old. So we skipped those and just ran back and forth finding eggs with rocks in them which Ella seemed to enjoy. It was freezing cold and raining the whole time, but she didn’t seem to mind… until she tripped over while running to find an egg. Then it was all over! She was cold and wet and upset about falling so we called it quits. We went indoors to get our chocolates and sat inside eating them which calmed her down. Despite the terrible weather I think she had fun!

On Easter Sunday we had much better weather thankfully. We had a big brunch and then headed outside for the Easter egg hunt. We all got a kick out of Ella discovering the eggs - with each find she let out a surprised "Oh! Another egg!". Very cute.





Ella isn't a huge fan of chocolate, so instead she found plastic eggs that had little toys or things inside, such as balloons, stamps and Paw Patrol underwear (Ella has been obsessed with Paw Patrol since we moved here). That afternoon we chilled out watching the next Toronto hockey match, which they sadly lost (they ended up losing the next game as well, which means they are out of the playoffs for this year). 

On Easter Monday we had beautiful weather and my parents gave Ella a new bike with training wheels. We sat outside enjoying the sun, all taking turns practicing riding her new bike up and down the street. She loves it, although she’s fallen over a few times and it takes a lot of convincing to get her back on!

Overall we had a nice weekend together as a family and by the end of it the weather was finally starting to feel more spring-like. (Though that hasn't lasted - the weather is back to being cold and rainy and miserable. I definitely do not remember winter lasting this long when I was a kid!)