Every year Pepper Mill stuffs those colored plastic eggs with candies and toys and hides them outside, so that MilliCal, our five-year-old daughter, can hunt for Easter Eggs left by the Easter Bunny himself.
MilliCal, no fool, wanted to stay up all night this year, “to see if the Easter Bunny was Real.” But we squelched that. She got up before we did on Easter Morning, but Pepper Mill ran out and hid the eggs while MilliCal was distracted.
While she was brushing her teeth, MilliCal looked out the window and sghouted “I see an egg!”
She did, indeed. There was a bright blue egg. Nearby was a yellow egg, and an orange one.
Squirrels had them, and were striving mightily to carry the eggs back to their trees. I quickly donned my shoes and ran out after them, screaming. The startled squirrels dropped their bundles, leaving eggs stranded halfway between their hiding places and the trees. We recovered the eggs, now scratched up from squirrel claws and teeth, but with the candy inside unharmed.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen (or even heard of) anything like that. We never had a problem before, in all our years of Easter Egg hunts. “The squirrels are aggressive this year,” commented my sister, talking about squirrel actions in her own yard.
So, MilliCal still isn’t sure if the Easter Bunny is real, and hides the Easter Eggs. But she knows for a fact that the Easter Squirrels take them away. If you’re not fast enough.