Anna Hoehn, her furry bunny-ears headband tilting a wee bit starboard, held tight to her woolly lamb basket Saturday as she ventured onto the lush green lawn of Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens with about 110 other toddlers.
The 2-year-old Hudson girl was shut out of last year’s Easter egg hunt here, which almost always sells out. So her mom and dad — Katie and Dan Hoehn — marked their calendar this year to book early.
About 1,000 blue, yellow, purple and orange eggs stuffed with toys or treats lay on the circular lawn in front of the historic manor house for the first round of the hunt. Anna passed them all until she found a pink egg, scooping it into her basket and turning in triumph toward her parents as if her mission was accomplished.
“Keep going,” her dad gently urged, videotaping this memory with his mobile phone.
“You can keep going,” her mom coaxed.
Anna and her bunny ears turned and headed back into the gaggle of toddlers to hunt more pink eggs.
Sometimes there’s a foot of snow during this annual tradition, sometimes messy mud. But this year’s hunt, with the exception of just a few raindrops, was Northeast Ohio springtime perfect. Thousands of daffodils, forsythia, violets and flowering trees and shrubs greeted visitors Saturday.
Stan Hywet bills itself as one of the most important remaining examples of an American Country Estate built at the turn of the 20th century during the industrial Age, a house built with a fortune made in Akron rubber.
But children’s eyes Saturday saw it differently.
To some of them, Stan Hywet is more Disney than history.
Sisters Mariah, 1½, and Madeline Domenic, 3½ — dressed in matching baby pink coats and hats trimmed in black bows — came with their family from Lakewood.
“They think a princess lives here and that this is her castle,” said Rachel Domenic, the girls’ mom.
She found the Stan Hywet event online last year while searching for an egg hunt for her daughters. They returned this year — along with the girls’ dad, uncle and grandmother, Karen Tatter from Lorain County.
“Everything here is so beautiful,” Tatter said sitting on a bench in front of the manor house watching children opening their eggs to see what was inside.
In all, about 300 children from toddlers to 9 years old collected 3,000 eggs.
Most were stuffed with retro candy like a Tootsie Roll or Bit-O-Honey, or a tiny bouncing ball or other small toy.
“What’s this?” one boy asked, lifting a plastic-wrapped sweet for his father to see.
“It’s a Swedish Fish,” the man said.
“Ewww,” the boy said, throwing it back into an Easter basket.
“It’s not a real fish,” the father tried to explain. “You’ll like it.”
But the boy didn’t believe him and reached for another piece of candy.
Back on the lawn, Anna’s parents shadowed her as she bent again and again, plucking up one pink egg after another as her pretty aqua party dress brushed against the damp grass.
Parents and grandparents by now had moved in among the toddlers to get better photos.
The Hoehns quickly counted the eggs in Anna’s basket. She had 11, one more than organizers planned for each child.
Before Anna seemed to notice, Katie Hoehn quickly pilfered one of the eggs from her daughter’s basket.
Katie Hoehn looked around for another toddler still on the hunt and then rolled the pink orb just hard enough so it landed at the feet of someone else’s little girl who lifted up the prize and put it into her own basket.
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.