My wife and I didn't have children, but that didn't stop us from having Easter egg hunts in our yard for a decade with "the kids."

Our kids were all adopted from the local animal shelters, two black labs and later the biggest German Shepherd I've ever seen.

Thelma and Louize were sisters and the last two of their litter at the pound. We went in looking for one puppy, and ended up with two (OK, I couldn't leave the second one alone in that cage).

Riley came along later, but he was already full grown, so we didn't go through the chewing stage with him. Thank goodness. He was a little thin when we adopted him (Autumn took to sneaking cheeseburgers into the shelter for him while waiting for his adoption waiting period to expire).

He filled out nicely, topping out at about 120 pounds and standing waist high next to me.

Thelma could smell food a mile away. It was hard surprising her with a special treat, she'd always meet us at the door.

She's also the reason Autumn started the tradition at our house of having Easter egg hunts with the puppies.

Autumn always said Thelma would have made a good "drug sniffing" dog. So we put her through a little test one Easter morning - could she sniff out little slices of egg we hid around our front yard.

So we made it a little competition between the dogs. We hid the egg slices all over the yard and the garden - in the grass, under clay pots, in the dry bird bath, on the car bumpers, and even on the furniture sitting on the front porch - then we let the dogs out of the garage for their own Easter egg hunt.

Thelma, as we expected, was very good at finding the eggs. Louize wasn't far behind, but with Thelma being so fast, a lot of the time she was finding spots where Thelma had already found the goodies.

Riley was a different story. If you were outside, he just wanted to be around you, so while the others were out searching, he was either just following them around or attached to me at the hip.

So it took a little direction, but we always pointed out a couple of eggs for him to "find."

We always ended the Easter egg hunts with a Tums for the puppies so they didn't get upset stomachs.

All our puppies were at least 12 years old when we moved to the Bay Area and we lost them over a two-year span. That's been a little more than two years now since the last one passed, but I still have wonderfully fond memories of Autumn coloring the eggs the night before and then the dogs sniffing out their hiding spots on chilly Easter mornings.

Have a happy Easter.