Easter, Christmas, Hallowe’en, even Valentine’s – when you’re a kid, the holidays can be a source of massive excitement.

And sometimes that excitement can result in a little boundary-pushing. But who can deny an excited kid the fun that comes from gifts, trick-or-treating and Easter Eggs?

That fun can go a little far though, and as a parent it’s important to know when and where to draw the line.

So when the couple in this story were planning an Easter Egg hunt for their friends, they anticipated that overexcited children might present something of an issue, and planned accordingly so everyone could have fun.

But they could have never anticipated what happened just before the hunt was about to begin.

Read on to find out how their fun ended in disaster.

AITA for confronting a mom whose kids were stealing all the eggs I’d hidden for my friends?

Yesterday my girlfriend (32, female) and I (35, female) threw a little combination Easter and 4/20 get-together for some friends in a large public park.

The get-together included, as one element, an Easter egg hunt.

This is a big local park where people often do small private egg hunts for their families and friends, so the idea isn’t totally out there.

Let’s see how they prepared for the event.

We bought around 100 plastic eggs, stuffed each one with 2-3 pieces of candy, and hid them within a smallish area of the park about 20 minutes before everyone else was due to arrive.

We figured because the weather was nice, we’d probably lose a few eggs due to kids walking by and stumbling on easy-to-find ones, but we bought enough that we could absorb some marginal losses.

Some were pretty visible, others psychotically well-hidden, most were pretty much in the middle – you’d have to really be looking to spot them walking by.

But not everything went to plan.

While we were waiting for all of our friends to arrive, we noticed three kids running around the area where we’d hidden them, and they all had their arms FULL of eggs. Like 15-20 apiece easily.

Their mom was sort of trailing behind, not paying attention, and on the phone. It got to a point where we finally got her attention, and she literally went, “Is it okay if they take these?”

My girlfriend and I were both dumbfounded. Because, again, we figured we’d lose a few eggs to kids who grabbed one or two. But this was EGREGIOUS. They had easily 50 between them.

There were 15 people coming. Yes, they were all adults, but adults also like to have silly fun too!

Let’s see how they responded to the clueless mom.

So we basically told her, uh, no? Please put them back? Her response was some version of “They’re just kids! It’s a kids’ holiday!”

I asked her if she usually lets her kids take candy from strangers off the ground in public parks, and said something along the lines of, “Weird parenting choice, but okay,” and she got huffy and told the kids they were leaving and to put them back.

The kids threw some of the eggs on the ground but still left with probably 40 eggs in total. Again, that’s… 80-120 pieces of candy that we bought. For our friends. And ourselves. Not for random children who didn’t even bother to ask before taking it.

If they’d asked, we probably would’ve said sure, within reason! 2-3 apiece! NOT LITERALLY HALF OF THEM.

So they

Also, as they were leaving my girlfriend called after them, “Good luck finding the ones filled with fentanyl,” which was very funny, but I don’t think they heard.

Anyway, now bad for calling her a bad parent in front of her kids and for ruining their fun, but I also have a real tendency to feel insanely guilty any time I stand up for myself (blame my own mom’s stellar parenting for that!)

AITA?

There’s a difference between kids taking one or two eggs out of excitement, and ruining an entire egg hunt.

But this is on the mom: she should have been supervising her kids properly, and if she had, she should have stopped their behavior before they even found more than a couple of eggs.

She was entitled and rude, so it’s no wonder that her kids behaved the same way.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person thought that a good parent would have told the kids to put the eggs back.

But other Redditors thought this was a bad idea in a public park.

Meanwhile, this person pointed out just how dangerous the situation could have been for the kids, and how poor the mom’s parenting was to allow them to take the eggs in the first place.

Sure, if it had just been a couple of eggs, denying the kids the joy of taking them would be a little mean-spirited.

But when it’s almost all the eggs from an egg hunt, a definite line has been crossed.

The fact that the kids didn’t return most of the eggs just makes this so much worse; their mom is okay with them stealing. What kind of start is that giving them in life?

She clearly doesn’t care.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.