Happy Easter!

This year we celebrated Easter a little early.  Spencer flew out for Paris on Friday afternoon, so we had our Easter Dinner on Thursday night and then Friday morning we held the festivities.

When I was a child, the Easter egg hunt tradition always involved a scavenger hunt.  This year Eliot was old enough to really get into it so I had prepared some plastic eggs around the apartment.  When he came out to breakfast he was given the first egg.  Inside was a clue that led him to the next egg, which held the clue to the next, and so on and so forth, until at last he was led to a cache of Easter treats hidden behind the couch.  He really enjoyed it, and the search took him to all sorts of interesting places; inside the fridge, under Mama's pillow, inside the washing machine, etc.

Peter didn't participate in the hunt, partly because he isn't old enough to appreciate it and partly because he is old enough to appreciate a little alone time with the toys while Big Brother was distracted with a scavenger hunt.  He did enjoy pulling his toys out of his Easter Bowl (I'd forgotten until the night before that we'd had to leave all of our wicker behind due to Australian quarantine rules) and though he didn't get a taste of Eliot's Easter Bilby, he did gobble up his fair share of hot cross buns.

As for the Easter Bilby, I had heard of it briefly before we moved here and leading up to Easter I started to see them in the store.  I bought one for Eliot and then asked a friend at church what the story was.  Evidently rabbits are not native to Australia and their introduction into the Australian ecosystem has seriously jeopardized some native species (a big issue for Australians as you can imagine).  So the native bilby was brought forward to provide an alternative to the pesky and environmentally dangerous Easter Bunny.  Whatever the issues behind it, Eliot sure enjoyed his Easter Bilby.  Part of the fun, of course, was saying 'Easter Bilby.'