This past Sunday was of course Easter and along with that comes fun activities like artwork on eggs and Easter egg hunts.  Most years, we color the eggs by dyeing them “old school” style by dropping them in and waiting but this year Brittney found this cool egg roller that I swear was made for people like me to make great artwork.  You simply just set the egg in the molded spot, turn it on and place the tip of any marker just touching the egg.  The egg continuously rolls on its little own personal treadmill below as the marker creates cool symmetrical designs around the egg.  It didn’t matter what color combination the kids used the eggs turned out awesome.  No vision was necessary other than of course ensuring that the kids were using the marker on the eggs and not drawing all over each other or the furniture.  Here are some of the cool designs that we created with about as little of artwork talent as one can possibly have. 

The other part of the Easter festivities is always a little more interesting.  Anything that involves the word “hunt” challenges every aspect of a blind person’s adaptive capacity.  This is especially true when you are not the one that did the hiding.  While the kids and I decorated the eggs, Brittney hid the eggs, so I had no idea where they were once the kids began their hunt.  

As a blind/VI individual one of the most effective skills that we use is situational awareness.  Put another way, we often must predict or assume our environment from prior situations that were similar.  When this works, it is amazing but when it doesn’t it can really look bad.  In the case of the egg hunt, I could predict all the common locations that eggs would typically be hidden; ledges, behind rocks, in corners, branches of trees, inside kid’s toys to name a few.  

 Although I wasn’t a participant in the egg hunt, as a parent you want to help direct and encourage the kids in finding the eggs, so I calmly meandered over to the above-mentioned areas as Kennan and Tut were like hawks over their prey.  Once I got near, if there seemed to be any unusual blurs of color or shape that didn’t seem normal in my visual world than I ventured even closer to confirm whether it was an egg or not.    Once I got virtually on top oof the egg and could confirm it, I excitedly would say, “Hey Tut come over here, I think daddy may see one.” 

The “situational awareness” strategy only works some of the time as we live in a constantly changing world.  Many times, during the hunt, I would think that I spotted an egg to find out that it was just a rock, a yellow flower, a piece of trash or any other object of nature.  In my world, anything that is contrasting in color or different than what I would expect a scene to look like could very well be an Easter egg.  

One other sneaky technique that stumps others is calmly going over to someone with full vision and asking them to describe the surroundings.  A few times in this hunt I casually went over to Brittney and said, “Are there any eggs around here.”  From there, I could then go and say, “He Kennan look over in these bushes, there may be one over here.”  If there were any bystanders, they may think that I actually saw the eggs in the bushes but in reality they were just tricked by my sneaky methods. 

I have my suspicions that