My First Easter Away From Home

Every single Easter in my twenty-six years of life has been spent with my family celebrating the holiday Stachura-style.  The last four years, Sean has been a part of that tradition participating in Easter egg hunts, beach trips, and candy swapping.  This year, however, I was in California and my family was in Texas, making this the first Easter ever without being at home, and I've quickly learned that holidays away from home are the hardest.  


I strongly hinted to Sean for a couple of weeks now that it wouldn't feel like Easter without an Easter egg hunt.  (Sean does not feel the same way.  After four years of losing the Easter egg hunts with my family have left him scarred and bitter)  I woke up this morning by Sean jumping on top of me handing me a plastic bag and telling me that it was my Easter egg basket.  I had strict instructions to find twenty-eight plastic Easter eggs, a bag full of jelly beans, and four Milky Way eggs.  The jelly beans I found early on (Starbursts jelly beans, all red ones!), but the eggs took a little bit more work.  The hardest one to find was among the corn husk flowers in a flower vase.  The egg blended right in.  Camouflage at its finest!  Now, comparing this Easter egg hunt to those of my family, this one had several major differences.  1) There was no competition among me and my sisters to race and find the eggs as fast as possible, 2) My parents, after twenty something years of hiding eggs, have started putting eggs in hard to reach, difficult to see, obscure places that usually involve all of us at the end searching for the remaining 1-3 eggs; Sean, this being his first time, has not reached that point yet so they were much easier to find, and 3) I had no one to compare eggs and loot with (since Sean did not partake in an hunt himself).

Zorro and I searching for Easter eggs

After collecting my loot, I opened my eggs finding Dove chocolate and Legos!  Legos in a an Easter egg?  Who knew!

Legos?  In an Easter egg?  YES!

Of course, after eating some chocolate eggs and some red Starburst jelly beans, naturally pre-breakfast we needed to put together the Legos.  It turns out, after I dumped out all the Easter eggs with Legos into one giant messy pile, that there were TWO separate Lego kits with two separate sets of instructions.  Oops!  Luckily, the pieces were distinguishable enough to figure out which was which.  

Where does this piece go?

A Star Wars fighter and a fireman

Another Stachura tradition is going to the beach over Easter weekend.  I'm not sure when it started, but my family in Texas was beaching it up again this year, so naturally Sean and I needed to do so as well in California.  Not that we need much urging to go to the beach!  This tradition was especially easy to follow this year, now that we live in San Diego only a couple miles from the beach!  


Sean has been wanting us to go boogie boarding for quite awhile, and we had finally bought boards this weekend.  What better day to try boogie boarding than Easter day?  We looked up the weather before hand: 62 degrees in the ocean, 66 degrees in the air, cloudy but will disperse and be sunny.  A nice beach day!  

Boogie-ing

Boarding

Although I didn't really know what to expect, boogie boarding was absolutely fantastic!  I couldn't stop grinning and "eeeeing" every time we caught a wave.  How had I never done this before?  On the same level of excitement, a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) popped his/ her little head up nearby right when we were in the middle of catching a wave!  I have this dream where one comes up near me, we have a special moment where he/she knows that I love him/her and he/she loves me too, then he/she lets me touch him/her while Sean (or someone else) captures this special moment on camera, and then we both go on our merry way.  Anywhoo, that did not happen today.  We boogied, we boarded, and we boogie boarded.  We boogied so hard that we barely noticed it had started to rain...until it started to pour.  Upon realizing the beach was emptying out, that the skies were dark grey, and that we had electronics that might not enjoy getting wet inside our beach bag, we rode one last wave into shore, packed up our stuff, and headed home.  


The rest of the day was spent in hot tubbing, lazy lounging, napping, grocery shopping, home-working, and more lazy lounging.  Overall, I would declare this Easter day a success!  Keeping traditions and beginning new ones is one of the great parts of being part of a new branch of a family: the San Diego Kienles.