Dear City We Live In,

The first ever town Easter Egg Hunt you hosted on Saturday was perhaps the poorest planned public event I have been to in recent memory.  It reminded me all too much of this story in recent news.

First, traffic to get into the park was ridiculous.  Police should have been controlling the traffic lights to get into the event like they were to get traffic out of the event.  The lack of parking was also due to poor planning - did no one realize that parking one row of cars with a space in between takes more space than parking two rows front to back with a space after two rows of cars?

There were registration booths, with no clear intent of what "registration" meant.  We got age category bracelets that were never checked, and the hunt location signs for bracelets quickly became useless.

How did you not anticipate a stampede when people were only allowed to enter the "egg field" on one short edge of the rectangle?  If you weren't at the front of the herd, you didn't get anything.  If your children weren't aggressive, you didn't get anything.  Scratch that - if your parents weren't aggressive and greedy and putting eggs in their children's baskets, you didn't get anything.  Three three-year-olds and no eggs?  Really?  What a fabulous community event.

Chalk it up to my hatred of large crowds of people.  I try to temporarily suppress that to try to do something fun for the kids.  But we certainly won't be returning next year.

Luckily, I was much more upset pissed off than my kids were.  And some very nice little kids gave the girls a couple of eggs.  And seeing the looks on their faces as they watched the helicopter dump eggs on the field made it all worth it.

A helicopter and a few pieces of melted chocolate can make a little girl's day.  But a mob of greedy parents ruined my afternoon.