Alternative Easter 'egg' ideas, anyone?

[LittleMonkiesMum]

My Mum is determined she wants to hide an Easter egg in the garden for DD1 16 months to find at Easter. I'd prefer not to give DD chocolate, and told Mum this and she thinks I'm a complete meany. I can't think of an alternative which DD will get really excited about and think something that she can eat may be best. Any ideas. Have also posted this on food. Cheers x

A little soft toy - chicken or bunny?

Surely one small egg won't hurt her? After all, you're in charge of her food intake, so she won't get hooked on choc IYKWIM?
If it's a real no-no, then what about a lovley fluffy bunny from Asda. They've got some very cute Easter bits in.
x

get one of those plastic eggs a nd fill it yourself

Real hard boiled egg with a painted shell

I'm with you on this one - what my mum never got was that if I said yes to her, then I'd have to say yes to my MIL too - and that would have meant that she would have ended up with eggs from all the Ils - and so would have resulted in 8 eggs! So we had a total ban on eggs too. As a compromise I suggested buying a small book or toy. You can buy books for the price of an egg, and they last that much longer too! Now my DD is 3, I allow a very small egg, but encourage people to buy books / small gifts instead.
HTH

We do presents instead of eggs too - I got ds a box of those play wooden eggs one year

When I was working as a nanny I always used to ask the girls if they wanted a present (book or toy) or another chocolate egg. They all, without fail, always chose a present.

Last year tesco did some lovely easter bunny toys and easter paint sets and craft kits etc. My dd was avoiding milk at the time and we found lots of lovely alternatives.

We're dreading Easter. DH comes from a large family so DS will probably end up with LOADS of Easter Eggs. While we do let him have the odd bit of chocolate as a treat, we don't want to be inundated.
And trying telling our parents not to get him any! It's like we've asked them to chuck a bucket of cold water over him. "ooh but he's GOT to have an Easter egg"....er, WHY exactly?

You could do the Orthodox thing like the Greeks etc - dye real hard boiled eggs on Good Friday. On Easter morning you get to have the fun:

Each person picks an egg
One holds it with the pointier end up
the other person holds theirs pointy side down. You knock the two eggs together.
Whoever wins gets to eat the broken egg.

Dyeing them can be a lot of fun, especially when you are a kid. You can do just plain colours, or use things like parsley leaves: place leaves against the egg and wrap in a clean stocking and tie a knot to keep it in place. Remove once the egg is dyed. You can handpaint with food colouring, or draw a design in wax, then do cold dyeing. Lots of ways to do it.

Unless children are allergic or on restricted diets, I can't see what's wrong with being inundated with chocolate once a year!They don't have to eat them all at once - I let mine eat quite a lot on Easter Sundeay, then dole the rest out over the next couple of weeks - making sure we have lots of visitors so that we get through them as quickly as possible.

Thanks all, some really good ideas, it's really hard, and I hadn't even considered the inlaws yet!!
I've bought some of the plastic eggs from Baker Ross and some organic chocolate raisins and think will fill them with a few of these and some other small toys. I suppose this year I can just bin any chocolate eggs dd receives as she won;t know any better, but next year...............

My immediate family has a tradition of the Easter Bunny leaving out 'trails' of string. My sister and I are four years apart, and a hunt wouldn't have been fair.

We still do this, and DS loves this. It's a bunch of tiny gifts (plastic dinosaurs, or soldiers or something), and some small plain nice easter eggs, and a book at the end.