Happy Easter?

It's a very special time here at our house. And by "special", I mean "involving a disturbing surprise".

Every year, we follow the old-fashioned tradition of coloring and hiding hard-boiled Easter eggs. After the great Egg Scare of 2004 (ES04), when we found a forgotten (but still intact) decorated egg a few days after Easter, we decided to meticulously document the number and location of all eggs hidden indoors from now on.

And I think we have. Our detailed inventory has allowed for 2 incident-free years since ES04. But despite the efforts of two egg-attentive parents, this year has revealed a somewhat more unpleasant treat. The entire event is strikingly similar to ES04, except for the time between the egg-placement and discovery. After a full FOUR MONTHS, the echo of Easter-past manifested itself in the form of a once beautifully-decorated, and now BROKEN pink shell still containing a shrunken sphere of solid protein! I'll spare you the "what's grosser than gross" part of the story, suffice to say that we were not the first things to discover the neglected egg.

How could this single egg have slipped past the radar? I mean, we counted the eggs before AND AFTER hiding! I have a theory: the Easter Bunny isn't the only one who likes to hide eggs. This is, apparently, a fun pastime for kids who like to re-play the magic of Easter morning for days after the initial event. Eventually the magic fades, along with the memory of re-hidden eggs. Fast forward four months, and a few insect life cycles later, and we have the makings of the Terrible Egg Event of 2007, dwarfing ES04 by several orders of magnitude.

Clearly, there are some weaknesses in our current Easter-inventory system, which you can bet will be corrected before Spring '08.