I have many happy memories of hunting for candy-filled eggs in our backyard with my sisters on Easter morning. I want my son to enjoy the same fun, but it's not quite the same when you live in an apartment.
We actually do have a teeny backyard, but at this time of year it's just an empty slab of concrete - not ideal for concealing anything - and most of our friends here in New York don't have any outdoor space.
Two years ago we happened to be out of the city visiting grandparents and we set up a major hunt around their house and barns which was a blast. Last year I simply hid eggs inside of our apartment - in empty shoes, on shelves, balanced precariously on door knobs. It was fun, but not the real deal.
There are a few outdoor egg hunts in our community that are open to all, but they are always mobbed and I've heard that the younger kids often miss out on finding any eggs. The year we were out of the city, friends we know grouped together with a few other parents and organized a hunt for their kids in one of the bigger city parks.
I still have a week to decide what I'm going to do. Fellow apartment dwellers, any ideas? What have you done?
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I don't live in an apartment, but I think it rained for about half the Easters of my childhood so we had a lot of indoor egg hunts. I always thought it was just as fun, and there were so many little nooks and crannies for eggs to be. They were also probably hidden better because the Easter Bunny could hide them the night before instead of having to wake up earlier than us to hide them outside. All the big public egg hunts I've ever been to have just had eggs thrown all over a large grassy area, more about speed in picking them up than actually a hunt. I don't really like those at all personally. I think whatever you do, your kids will love. But if I really wanted to do an outdoor thing I'd probably get together with a small number of friends in a park that would actually have good egg hiding places as opposed to an empty field. Or you could just do it as a family.
I'd definitely still hide the eggs in the apartment for when they wake up in the morning though, regardless of what else you do. There's just something about it!
When we lived in an apartment, we went to a small pocket park in a nice residential neighborhood. We went fairly early in the morning and it was empty.
My parents hid our Easter baskets, which was a lot more exciting. You give the first egg to the kid, which opens to reveal a clue, like a shoelace to look in the closet, or a phrase like "my best friend is a fork" to go look in the spoons for the next egg with a clue. Each egg leads you to the next until you finally get the basket, so it makes the hunt take longer than randomly running around the house and looking.
We have a yard but have always done the hunt inside. We live in Michigan. Easter is cold. Always.
Once, we did try to hide the eggs outside, only to wake up to a windstorm at 3 am. We gathered what we could and hid them inside. We were finding egg bits for a couple of years afterwards!
We lived in an apartment growing up, and my mom always did indoor jellybean hunts. They're smaller and more challenging to find than the bigger hard-boiled or plastic eggs, and you can match colors to blend them in to make it even harder as the kids get older (i.e., white and black jellybeans on a piano keyboard, red ones along the edge of a red book on a bookshelf, yellow ones on the yellow couch cushion, etc). My sister and I loved it, and I'm continuing the tradition now with my son, even though we have a backyard. (Whenever we did the outdoor hunts at parks or schools, we found them a lot less interesting because as someone else noted, the eggs just get thrown and it's just about running to get as many as you can, not about finding well hidden treasures!)
Hmm, when I was growing up (in Regina, SK, Canada), it was often still fairly cold on Easter. We still had snow many times, and if not it was horrible wet and mucky out. So we always had our egg hunts indoors, around the house. Sometimes we wouldn't find them all and find a funny surprise days, weeks, or months later! Oops. But I have wonderful memories of scouring our home for eggs, I don't see a problem with it. :)
@Rroseisred - I love the idea of a jelly bean hunt which solves both the problem of being indoors and in a small apartment; thanks!
I'm from a northern M state too, and Easter was snowed out more often than not. So Mom and Dad would hide the eggs indoors. One year, they didn't keep a good count of how many eggs were hidden. They lost track of one that was left to rot for several days before we could finally track down the offender. We used plastic eggs from then on!