I love simple little job aids that give me the freedom to stop worrying about things I’m supposed to remember. After having to replace the motor in my wet-ice, under-the-counter ice maker (turned off the water but not the ice maker), I took a big Sharpie marker and wrote directly on the concrete wall next to the water shut-off value, “ICE MAKER!” Now, I always remember.
We have plenty of other job aids at my house — there’s the last gallon of milk job aid and my Christmas lights job aid. So it’s only natural, and a little surprising that it took this long, that I finally created the Easter egg job aid. Traditionally on Easter, I hide 100 eggs in our yard (25 for each child). We write their initials on each egg, and the children have to find their specific eggs. I make the older children’s eggs more difficult to find.
Every year, we lose a few eggs. Maybe I get too aggressive with making the hunt challenging; or maybe our yard is too overgrown with flowers, shrubs and weeds; or maybe we really should get the kids eyes examined. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, we have a consistent performance problem.
So this year, the kids suggested I take pictures of all the eggs as I hide them. That way we could go back and see which where the missing eggs are. I get their point, but that wasn’t a practical solution. How would you categorize those 100 photos for easy search? Or know which ones were found or not? And really, one egg in the grass looks just like another egg in the grass.
So my solution…
STEP 1: Grab a quick screen shoot of our house from Google maps. Then copy it in a Noteshelf notebook four times (a separate page for each child).
STEP 2: Use the pen tool to mark the location of each egg.
STEP 3: When it’s time to look for the missing eggs, grab my iPad and walk the yard with each child. The joke of the morning was, “There’s an app for that.”
I thought it was brilliant — truly one of my better ideas, but here’s the thing: three days later, there are still two eggs missing. Maybe I should just make the eggs a little easier to find next year.
What’s one of your crazy Easter egg stories? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
