Halloween Surprise Egg

Is anyone else's kid obsessed with watching those toy videos on YouTube? The ones where people just literally unpackage toys? I have no idea how we came across those but eventually those videos led to surprise egg videos and now Ez is obsessed. Surprise eggs are giant eggs filled with random toys and covered in playdough. Not sure how these came about but my assumption is Playdough & toy companies got together and dreamt em up. Genius marketing on their part.

Anyway, fast forward to this past weekend when Joe was out of town. I wanted to save our Halloween outings for when he could join us, so instead I came up with some activities we could do at the grandparents house since they have a backyard and we don't. Cue the Halloween egg hunt. And since we were already combining some Easter fun with Halloween I figured why not just throw in the whole basket of goodies too? And then I thought, what about a pumpkin surprise egg??? Yeah, I have no idea how many cups of coffee I'd had that morning. Clearly one cup too many. But it seemed fun at the time.

I didn't feel like spending a ton of money on even more toys that they really don't need so I dug into my stash of toys and crafts that I have hidden around the house for when I feel like they need a bribe prize. I gave myself a $15 budget mostly to get some of those little surprise toy packages which are the main star of surprise eggs. I picked up three of those, some dollar bin Halloween glow sticks, a pack of candy corn M&Ms, little bath toys for Declan, and plastic pumpkin "eggs". I already had a large plastic egg leftover from Easter, some hot wheels, a monster truck, candy, a Frankenstein painting craft, a little Sully toy from Monster's Inc, some tattoos, and lots of playdough. 

I decided to get a little crafty with the Halloween theme and made a toilet paper roll mummy and Frankenstein to put some candy in. I also filled the pumpkin eggs with a few M&Ms or tattoos. Then it was time for the playdough. I had four little cans of the stuff and it wasn't quite enough. I think five would've been fine, or maybe six just to be safe. I rolled it out with a rolling pin as flat as I could get it and then I covered the egg as much as possible. Since I was short on the playdough I didn't cover the bottom but I don't think Ez noticed or cared. 

I was going for a jack o'lantern look. The result was creepy. I believe Joe's exact words when I texted him a photo were: "Good lord. Delete." Those blue triangle eyes are haunting. We'll just say that was intentional for Halloween. Yep, that's exactly the look I was going for... 

Thankfully Ez didn't find it as frightening as Joe and I. I gave it to him after our egg hunt and he couldn't contain his excitement. He was jumping up and down, exclaiming, "It's an egg! A pumpkie egg! It's covered with playdough! Let's find out what's inside!" It took him about five minutes to get all the playdough off. When he finally got the thing open he beelined straight for the monster truck. I made him wait to open it till he'd looked at everything else so he went straight for the candy in the mummy and Frankenstein. He wound up getting a little jackal in his Lion Guard surprise package, a Winnie the Pooh tsum tsum keychain, and the British Invasion Bob minion. Surprisingly he forgot about the monster truck and started racing Winnie the Pooh around the yard instead. I told him that was the fastest Winnie the Pooh I'd ever seen so every time he raced by me he'd say, "this is the fastest Winnie the Pooh!" and then zoom off. 

You didn't think I forgot about Deckles, did you? Of course not! I don't trust him with playdough, but I did give him a little basket of goodies as well. Thankfully he's as easily impressed by empty boxes and rocks at this stage, so he was perfectly content with a few bath toys and suckers. 

All in all I'd say it was a hit and worth the time and mess that the playdough caused, though maybe you should ask Grampa if he agrees since there's still playdough crumbs in his lawn ;)