Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

In March we hosted a neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt to get to know the people who live around us a little better.  With help from lots of friends, we cooked hot dogs, decorated cookies and hunted about 1,000 eggs (:

I had great plans for making everything look cute, but you know what they say about plans (:  On the Tuesday before the hunt on Saturday we had a small house fire.  That pretty much nixed everything except what I already had done and the bare essentials.  Bye-bye Cheetos in icing bags so they look like carrots.  And the wheat grass I bought to "plant" in a vase. (:

About 30 of our neighbors attended and many brought donations to help out as well because they loved what we were doing.  It was great to meet so many new people!  We found out one of our neighbors is from Zambia -- not the region Josh and I visited, but I loved having that shared experience.

With help from some of our teenaged friends, we put out about 1000 eggs in our front yard.  1000 eggs doesn't look like much, but every kid went home with a full basket.  We separated the yard in two:  one for preschoolers and one for school aged kids.  The preschoolers got tired of picking up eggs before they were all gone so the older kids were happy to help (:

We served everyone lunch:  we ate hot dogs, cheetos and cheddar bunnies, Capri Suns and Hawaiian Punch.  For dessert we decorated plain sugar cookies.  For the sugar cookies I made eight different flavors and colors of frosting and some homemade sugar sprinkles.

My sister designed these tags for the Cheetos and Cheddar Bunnies.

She also designed this Easter Subway Art.  Isn't she awesome?  I'm pretty sure I couldn't host an event without her and my mom's help.  They would probably agree (:

What's a party without balloons? (:

One of the projects I completed before the house fire was a book page mod-podged Easter Egg tree with a milk bottle vase.  Sounds impressive, right? (:  You can see my inspiration here.  I hadn't counted on it being windy (I know, winter in Alabama = silly me).  So I had to mar the visual perfection (ha) by filling the milk bottle with clear marbles.  But I didn't have enough so I had to use yellow ones too (:  And...it still blew over.  Since the only trees we have in our yard are Willows and Bradford Pears, sticks were hard to come by...so when it blew over all the carefully selected only ones big enough in our entire yard not covered in thorns branches snapped.  All of them.  This happened while I was inside doing something so a well-meaning neighbor fixed it for me (: And of course the only picture I have of the arrangement is after the tumble.  Oh well, I like(d) it. (:

Our boys loved having new friends over and our neighbors enjoyed meeting each other.  We're planning another get together for sometime in August.  Now to follow up with our neighbors... (: