Surprise!

Figure 1

It's not every day you come home from school and find an Easter egg hunt in your yard, but that's exactly what happened to Johanna Friday afternoon.

Let's set this up a little: Fridays are generally my early days off from work, and Johanna had requested that I pick her up instead of waiting for Eric to come at 4:15 p.m. When we drove up to the house, Johanna was like, Mom, what's that egg carton doing on the driveway? and I was all, oh, probably just a flyaway from the recycling bin.

I asked her to pick it up on her way in the house for me. Because I am lazy. She did, of course.

Turns out it wasn't a flyaway egg carton after all. Johanna had been "egged" by an anonymous person who had hidden 12 plastic Easter eggs in the yard (Johanna was perplexed at first--we have three yards and she wasn't sure which one to start with), 11 of which were filled with candy and surprises. The 12th egg was empty, like the tomb. Well, that's the whole point, you know.

Johanna actually asked for permission to start hunting--uh, what? She found eight fairly quickly, and lined them up by color (lucky she's organized like that, 'cause she realized there were two of each, which helped narrow down what she was looking for at the end).

Whoever hid these did a REALLY good job. It wasn't a throw a bunch of eggs in the yard and call it a day kind of thing--those puppies were hidden very carefully, and very well. The very last egg--a purple one--was hiding in the phlox. At that point, I was wondering if maybe we'd never find it. 

That was a whole half-hour of entertainment. Super, super cool.

I have a feeling this is the work of the Jesuit volunteers in town--they have lots of energy--but the two I talked with at Mass that night denied any responsibility.

Curiouser and curiouser.

So that was unexpected. Here's a closing shot of Johanna with her color-coordinated eggs. I just realized she's got them rainbow-sorted:

Figure 2

Thank you, anonymous egg hider! That was fun. :)

UPDATE: The Jesuit volunteers all deny responsibility, so now I'm really stumped...