This blog comes from, husband and wife duo, Luke and Carly Daley who run Daley Nutrition and PT, where they offer a range of services including workshops to educate children on healthy eating. The duo are also self-professed slaves two little hurricanes who ensure that their lives are never boring.
Easter, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the celebration of all things chocolate and for some people it probably is. However, lots of things have changed recently and one thing that we can all agree upon is that Easter isn’t going to be the same this year. As things stand, there won’t be any big family lunches, community Easter egg hunts or even friends and neighbours coming over for a coffee and to drop something off for the kids.
For us, we think that this period of self-isolation marks a good time to get creative and shift Easter holiday expectations away from the excessive consumption of chocolate and to refocus it on intimate family time, creating new holiday traditions and supporting our community.
In particular, this year our family will be focusing on …
Supporting small businesses
So many small, local and independent sellers and businesses are struggling right now. In order to help we are planning to check out the Facebook marketplace, Etsy or Madeit to see what we can safely buy online to help support these struggling businesses.
We recently got some fabulous Easter T-shirts for our girls that they can colour in and wear. We’ve given our 5-year-old her t-shirt already and it was a huge success!
They loved making the t-shirts so much that we think that this will be the start of a new non-chocolate-gift-giving tradition in our household, where we will substitute chocolate for clothing, crafts and books instead.
Doing something active as a family
The Easter egg hunt is synonymous with Easter, but we’re bigger fans of the scavenger hunt. So much so, that we’ve designed one with some physical activities that you’re welcome to print off and use for your own family! You can find it here.
Our 5-year-old loves our annual scavenger hunts. We normally hiding little containers that are filled with cute fluffy chicks and the next clue around our house and then we let her run wild. This year, for our littlest daughter we are planning to unravel and weave a ball of string around the house, which will lead her to the treasure at the end.
Festive crafts
Another great idea that we are going to try to incorporate into our household this year is to do some festive crafts in the lead up to Easter with whatever’s just lying around the house. Whether it’s painting some spare eggs we have in the fridge or making bunnies out of recycled toilet paper rolls, crafting offers something fun for everyone and it makes for some amazing decor.
Reaching out to others
Although it will just be us and our two daughters celebrating at home this year, because of physical distancing restrictions, it is still important to reach out to and connect with others and share love and positivity with everyone.
This year we are planning to leave some pavement chalk at the end of our kids’ scavenger hunt. Once they find the chalk, we will go outside as a family and draw pictures on the footpath at the front of our house for all to see. We hope that this will bring joy to our neighbours, the community and all that travel past our home.
We are also planning to Facetime our family members, near and far, to safely check in and celebrate with everyone we love.
One upside of everything that’s happening at the moment is that we feel like we have more control over what is given to our daughters. Hopefully we can show them that a huge stash of chocolate isn’t essential to having a special day.
Don’t get us wrong, although we are planning to cut back on chocolate this year, we do have it on good authority that the Easter Bunny does have full immunity from the coronavirus and will still be making a visit to our house.
We hope that the new traditions and positive changes that we have introduced this year will continue into the future and that chocolate will remain secondary at Easter time.
