This wasn’t the case for us this year, but in past years we’ve certainly had this problem.
When your kids are overloaded with chocolate for Easter because the grandparents and the aunties gave them chocolate. And so did their teachers and school friends. And so did your neighbours, and the elderly lady across the street. And every shop you went into in the week leading up to Easter also offered them a free chocolate egg.
Everyone is well intentioned. Everyone loves the smile they receive from kids when you give them chocolate.
But what’s a parent supposed to do when your kids end up with a few kilos of the stuff?
Option 1: Our usual go-to. Ration it out. Let them have a bit every day. That way they’re not gorging themselves.
Option 2: Get it all over and done with – let them eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Easter Sunday and be done with it. Suffer the hyperactivity for one period of time and move on with life.
But one year we looked at the pile of chocolate the kids had amassed and neither of those options felt good to us. Option 1 would mean they’d be eating chocolate every day for weeks. Option 2? They probably couldn’t eat all of that in one day. And did we really want to teach them to eat until they’re sick?
Then inspiration struck.
“Kids! Would you prefer money to all those eggs?”
And thus began what I call The Easter Egg Buy-Back Scheme.
I had a look at what a block of chocolate cost in the shops and calculated how much it cost to buy per gram.
Then the kids put aside a bit of chocolate to eat, and the rest they handed to us. We weighed each kid’s pile of surplus chocolate and paid them for it by the gram.
They were happy, we were happy. It enabled them to convert their Easter eggs to things like books or Lego, and no one succumbed to chocolate overdose.
So what did we do with the chocolate we bought? No, we didn’t gorge on it ourselves. We smashed it up and put it in a container and used it at later times for baking.
