Mailing Some Love

There's some debate about whether eggs have anything to do with Easter. I don't really care. (I've never been on an egg hunt in my life, and I don't feel too deprived, but it's also something I could see doing with my kids someday.) Even so, ever since I saw that you could mail the plastic ones as-is, no wrapping required... I knew Khy was gonna get some. :)

I actually bought some last year, along with candy and stuffers, but I never managed to buy some washi tape, and then in between getting all ready to leave (on Easter morning!) to go to Alabama for BFF's wedding... yeah. Didn't happen.

This year, I actually managed to get all six eggs stuffed, sealed, and addressed a whole week early! And then I had to wait until today to mail them. :)

(Just a sidenote: the girls were obsessed with the eggs. And the stuff inside them. I actually gave them a bouncy rubber ball that wouldn't fit inside, and they spent the next thirty minutes carrying it around, rolling it, and stealing it from each other. But even more exciting to them were the eggs themselves - especially the ones that were already sealed. They wanted to crack/chew those things open and play! So... I may have made some extra eggs for them. Just sayin'. ;) )

Anyway...

I stuffed the eggs with: Jolly Ranchers (c'mon, you gotta have some candy!), Silly Putty (the glow-in-the-dark kind, natch) a "Jacks" game (with little bunnies instead of jacks, lol!), mini bubbles and wands, bouncy balls, and something called a "lucky egg" which is basically a plastic squishy egg that looks just like if you cracked open a real one. I was both repulsed and fascinated by it. ;)

And then I took them to the post office.

Now, I was prepared for some resistance to the idea, so I had the giverslog page all loaded up on my phone so I could whip it out and show it to the postal worker, if necessary.

There were two workers at the counter when I went in (I was at the very end of a longish line, but thank God there was nobody behind me!); one was an older lady, and one was a gal about my age. The gal was very animatedly helping a customer pack their stuff, and talking with her hands, and looked like just the sort of person who would help you mail Easter eggs. I was praying I would get her. But I didn't. I got the older lady.

I walked up to the counter with my best big smile and put the eggs down on the counter. "I'd like to mail these, please," I said.

She looked at them, and then at me. "Like that?" she asked. I nodded and kept smiling. "Yup, just like that! I saw it on the Internet that you could do it and I'm so excited! These are going to a special little guy I only get to see a couple of times a year, and he'll love them!"

She moved towards the computer, stopped, and looked back at me. "I don't think we do that anymore."

I put on my best sad puppy dog face. "Really? Are you sure?"

She thought for a moment, then turned to the younger gal (who by this time had finished with her customer) and said, "Do we mail Easter eggs? Just like this?"

The younger gal took one look at my eggs and squealed in delight. "Oh, my gosh, yes, we can! I saw this online! It's so awesome! I've always wanted to help mail Easter eggs!"

The older lady admitted she didn't know how to mail them, and the younger gal said she'd be right back with the supervisor and darted off. The older lady looked at me again and asked if I didn't just want a padded envelope? Or a box? I smiled very politely and said no, thank you.

;)

The younger gal returned with the supervisor, who was clearly not as enthused about the idea, but was surprisingly tolerant. Apparently yesterday she mailed a coconut. ;) She warned me that 1), the eggs weren't big enough to fit a tracking number on, so I was mailing them without any certainty that they'd arrive, and 2) there was no certainty that the eggs wouldn't break, burst, or get lost. It was a gamble.

Since I'd spent so little on the eggs and their stuffing to begin with, I didn't mind taking a little risk.

So the supervisor began weighing the eggs, realized that they would all cost the same to ship, and began wondering how to attach postage labels.

I volunteered that "on the Internet" they just used plain old stamps.

"Oh, we can't do that," the supervisor assured me. "They wouldn't stick. They'd fall off. That's not the way to do it."

I didn't really care how they shipped, so long as they shipped, so I didn't press the issue. But a couple of minutes later, after trying in vain to fit a postage label on them, the younger gal pulled out a book of stamps and pointed some out to her supervisor and said, "Look, couldn't we just use two of these... and two of these... ?" And turns out, this was indeed the solution.

In the end, each egg cost about $2 to ship (meaning that next year, I think I'll ship one or two jumbo-size eggs instead of half a dozen regular sized) which I found surprisingly expensive. But whatever. :) By Friday, Khy should open his mailbox door and discover that the Easter bunny hopped all the way from Maryland to Alabama to leave him an early surprise.

And by the end, after all the eggs were stamped and ready, even the older lady had entered into the spirit of whimsy and enthusiasm, and requested that I let them know how many eggs arrived at their intended destination. :)

Happy Easter!

P.S. Oh, and Reb? Get ready. ;)