So we expected 500+ at our Easter Egg Scramble (Hunt) and had 5 times that many people show up. Because of the weather, we moved our location...and had to flex a bit.
We had wall to wall to wall to wall people. It was crazy. We rented games, gave our free hot dogs, pie, drinks, candy to tons of people. We had 11,000 Easter Eggs.
And yesterday I started getting the ticked off e-mails of moms who's kids didn't get any eggs.
I've heard that it happens at any Easter Egg Hunt with more than 30 kids. I talked with a couple of churches that have done hunts on this level and they told me to just expect it.
Ours was a little out of control though. At one point we had a couple of thousand people around our field just waiting to run out and pluck their 4 cents worth of plastic. They were cold and not very patient. I thought we'd curbed the impatience a little by keeping most of the pre-event games, etc. inside the building in the gym and other areas in our church. I was wrong.
At one point we had a couple of people in each area with big bags of candy walking around to the folks behind the lines giving them candy. We figured that'd buy us 5 minutes...sort of like you entertain people in between innings by shooting t-shirts into the crowd. Right when they started handing out the candy, a lady in the crowd yelled out, "Ready- Set - Go!" and even though there were still people coming outside from the gym and atrium - the crowd just started the Easter Egg Hunt on their own.
You can't really stop 2,000 people once the mob starts.
So kids didn't get Eggs (including Griff, Cooper and Parker). Moms were ticked. Kids were crying. Some kids went home with a garbage bag full of eggs and some didn't get any.
I'd heard that we should put a limit on the number of eggs kids can have. It's hard to believe that since we found kids breaking into the boxes of eggs before the event - had parents elbowing kids out of their kids way to the eggs - and a near riot, that kids would follow our limit that we'd have no real way of enforcing.
So this might have been two egg hunts in one.
My first - and my last.
We had wall to wall to wall to wall people. It was crazy. We rented games, gave our free hot dogs, pie, drinks, candy to tons of people. We had 11,000 Easter Eggs.
And yesterday I started getting the ticked off e-mails of moms who's kids didn't get any eggs.
I've heard that it happens at any Easter Egg Hunt with more than 30 kids. I talked with a couple of churches that have done hunts on this level and they told me to just expect it.
Ours was a little out of control though. At one point we had a couple of thousand people around our field just waiting to run out and pluck their 4 cents worth of plastic. They were cold and not very patient. I thought we'd curbed the impatience a little by keeping most of the pre-event games, etc. inside the building in the gym and other areas in our church. I was wrong.
At one point we had a couple of people in each area with big bags of candy walking around to the folks behind the lines giving them candy. We figured that'd buy us 5 minutes...sort of like you entertain people in between innings by shooting t-shirts into the crowd. Right when they started handing out the candy, a lady in the crowd yelled out, "Ready- Set - Go!" and even though there were still people coming outside from the gym and atrium - the crowd just started the Easter Egg Hunt on their own.
You can't really stop 2,000 people once the mob starts.
So kids didn't get Eggs (including Griff, Cooper and Parker). Moms were ticked. Kids were crying. Some kids went home with a garbage bag full of eggs and some didn't get any.
I'd heard that we should put a limit on the number of eggs kids can have. It's hard to believe that since we found kids breaking into the boxes of eggs before the event - had parents elbowing kids out of their kids way to the eggs - and a near riot, that kids would follow our limit that we'd have no real way of enforcing.
So this might have been two egg hunts in one.
My first - and my last.
bummer. there is an upside i'm sure. probably 90% of the people really enjoyed it.
ReplyDeletefor what it's worth, we stopped doing ours this year (not as big, only a couple hundred people) for a variety of reasons... no one seemed to miss it!
my niece and nephew had a great time...
ReplyDeletei think i was more upset at the parents who had started early, scooping up eggs for their kids, than my niece and nephew were at not finding any eggs. they didn't care, they were just happy to have their hands painted and jump in the big green inflatable deal...which is probably true for a lot of the kids there.
I'm feeling for you Murph. That event sounds like something from a movie.
ReplyDeleteI was in a movie once.
ReplyDeleteholy damage control, Batman! Mad mommas with screaming eggless kids... how did you survive! CBB
ReplyDelete