One of the perks of being welcomed into a family with a totally different set of holidays, traditions and customs, is that I get to experience many fun things the very first time, when I'm old enough to remember (and document!) it.
So this time, it was the hunt for Easter eggs.
[this part is for the Israelies, Americans may skip:
Unlike Passover eggs (which we
dip in salt water to remind us of the Israelites
crossing the 1.2m-deep Nile river, of course),
Easter eggs come in many different colors. They are laid by the
Easter Bunny, whose job is to hide
candy and
chocolate around the house, and lay eggs. Nobody knows what they represent, but since they look nice and colorful, nobody questions them. If the Easter bunny is too busy to lay eggs, parents and children help him in his task, by coloring fake
chicken eggs with special colors. This is reported to be really fun, but somewhat addictive, so make sure you have a limited amount of eggs at home.]
The egg hunt started with a long debate, regarding the exact manner in which the eggs are to be hidden, and what scoring scheme will be applied. We considered a few options, including several rules adopted from the famous 'Khan' game (I am still waiting for Erin to write the full set of Khan rules!). Someone suggested to let the kids wait in the living room and hide all the eggs in the refrigerator. hmm. I wonder who that could have been. Eventually, we decided that each kid hides his own eggs, and then everybody gets to search for them together. DadK helped. He also helped us look for them later. Grady complained a lot, since he was not allowed to search.
The scoring scheme: one point for each egg you find + for each of your eggs you get a number of points according to the order of it's discovery. For example, if you found 6 eggs, and your eggs were the 1st, 3rd, 10th and 15th to be found, you get 4+1+3+10+15=33 points.
An old (and odd, if you ask me) tradition, is that the loser of the egg hunt has to dig a grave for the dead cat. It seems that every year, as the ground defrosts, it is customary to bury a cat. This time it was poor Bob, who waited for this occasion for almost a year. [add Bob's picture here]. After all the eggs were recovered, and the loser was declared (me), Ben and Matt dug the grave, and we all paid our respects to poor old Bob. I wonder who it's gonna be next year :S
Anyway, this is a picture of the back yard, in which we hid 12 colored eggs. Find the eggs!!!
... and the diet coke experiment should get it's own post on the blog, don't you think?
Scientist puts mentos in the tube of paper on top of the freshly opened bottle of Diet Coke
Scientist removes the other piece of paper from beneath the tube, allowing the mentos to fall into the Diet Coke all at once.
