Frugal Easter Breakdown

So how did we manage to pull off a very frugal Easter this year for the kids? Well a huge "shout out" to the Target dollar spot to start with. I have been visiting on my lunch hour and picking up things here and there for the kids. I found a couple of activity books for Nathan there and some markers and Elmo books for Nick...and Lauren, well she's 1, let's just say that she's not old enough to know that I filled all her eggs with Kix from the cereal cupboard!

I also hit up a lot of the Walgreens sales for things when they were 39cents each, and that pretty well rounded out everything I shoved into the baskets (which were bought at Target last year for 75% off!). We certainly don't go overboard, and I would love to keep it that way.

Saturday morning we went to town and did the Kiwanis Easter egg hunt in the city park. It was bright and sunny out, so it was absolutely packed. They basically let the kids pick up as many eggs as they want and then they cash in their eggs for a goody bag at the end, which is fine by me. Kids can get brutal at these things, so I would rather just let them pick up a couple eggs and still end up with their "prize" and not have to fight for it. Nick ended up winning a special sand box kit too, which was nice considering how much sand we have in our yard and how much time we spend near water and sand during the summer.

Later on Saturday afternoon we went to church for EasterFest, along with about 500-600 of our closest friends (LOL right?). They literally had 10,000 eggs out in the field in front of church for the kids to grab, and it's always a mad dash (exactly what the park egg hunt is not). In any case, they do a ton of stuff with the kids like crafts, games, a hot dog cook out, a cake walk, face painting, and just an overall fun time to spend the afternoon.

Easter Sunday we went to church and made dinner for ourselves, my mother in law (and her husband), and our next door neighbor. It was a great time for all of us to sit around and talk and just fellowship with each other. Nobody ran right out the door after dinner, but nobody lingered for hours on end either, so once our guests left and we had things reasonably in order, we put the kids in the stroller and walked over to the park to play. It's not the biggest park in the world, in fact I've seen bigger play areas at preschools, but it's nice to have close by and it's never busy, so we go there quite a bit with the kids to play.

One thing we are really trying to instill into our children is that our Earth is precious and it's our gift from God to maintain and take care of, so when we go for walks, we always try to bring a bag to collect litter and trash in. Well we forgot this time, but while I was walking with Lauren at the park, I found a piece of litter that happened to be a plastic grocery bag, so as I walking around the park with her, I stopped to pick up random bits of litter here and there, and we had the bag pretty much full by the time we got home.