A: Three or four, if you time it right!
The Saturday before Easter was a whirlwind for my 6 year-old son and I. We left the house at about 8:30 in order to be at the first Easter Egg Hunt, held at Sea-Tac's Angle Lake Park, at 9:00 a.m. Despite arriving early, there was no parking so we had to park at the neighboring Alaska Airlines corporate parking lot and risk getting towed. With all the people parking there, though, they would have had to call every surrounding city in order to get enough tow trucks! Besides, these hunts begin and end quickly, and we were out of there by 9:20.
If you've never been to Angle Lake, it's a lovely park with a covered BBQ area, play equipment, and sandy beach area with a dock for the fishermen. It was very picturesque that morning, with the sun's rays reflecting off of the lake and a lone fisherman in a rowboat enjoying the quiet before the onslaught of children.
This hunt was very well organized. There were different sections of the park cordoned off for different age groups. There were also dozens of prize Easter baskets under the BBQ shelter, for kids who found a special plastic egg.
Firemen were out spreading candy like grass seed across the lawn as the excitement was building. Kids were running up to the Easter Bunny to have their picture taken. The Easter Bunny was handing out huge decorated sugar cookies(600 calories and 26 grams of fat per cookie, BTW!) to each kid.
Then the countdown began, the yellow tape was lowered so that the kids wouldn't trip, and then the kids were given the signal to go for it!! In one big burst hundreds of kids ran out to get as much candy as they could; or in my son's case, to pick through the candy to get as much banana Laffy Taffy as he could.
The only problem? Even though this was a hunt for kids aged 4 - 6, unfortunately the organizers did not tell the parents to stay back, so...along with the swarm of kids came the swarm of 'helpful'(read: extremely annoying) parents telling their kids what to pick up. Big, overbearing parents getting in the way of little ones trying to pick up candy. I guess that's to be expected when giant Easter baskets are at stake.
I mean, I told my son to go for the plastic eggs, but how he goes about his hunt is his choice, and with every hunt he adjusts his strategy. It's all part of learning how to problem solve. Despite all of that, though, it was lots of fun.
After Angle Lake we headed over to our church Egg Hunt at Grace Baptist on 28th in North Shorewood; that was a blast, and how sweet of them to offer free Latte's to the parents! Yeah.
Once we finished that hunt, as we headed home to Burien, I remembered that the Burien Community Center Egg Hunt was starting in 3 minutes; we pulled into the parking lot, ran out of the car, and got to the area right as the organizers were announcing the rules. (Rule #1 - NO PARENTS ON THE FIELD!) Hallelujah.
That hunt started prematurely when, in a Bugs-Bunnyesque twist someone misunderstood the organizer, who was saying, "Now when I say, GO...and off the kids went, stampeding their way to get the candy before all the candy was put out. As they were hunting, volunteers were throwing out more candy behind them(including huge Nerd Ropes - Yum!) That was fun.
I missed the W. Seattle Thriftway egg hunt, which I've heard is also quite good. But there's always next year!
