Eggs and Chocolate

I think I'm about done with coloring Easter eggs.  Every year it seems to get messier and more annoying for me, and I'm already rolling my eyes at the thought of wrangling five kids trying to dip eggs into smelly batches of vinegar solutions while dribbling pastel colored stain all over their clothes and each other.  Just not real fun for me anymore.  But the kids still enjoy it, and I always seem to forget how much I don't, once the store shelves fill with Paas coloring kits (and Reese's Peanut Butter Easter Eggs) each spring.  So, the tradition continues, and I continue to go through a whole roll of paper towel and more than a dozen eggs, only to throw them away two weeks after they're colored. 

This year we graduated to the dozen-and-a-half size container of eggs.  I can't believe in a few years we'll be buying 30 eggs so each kid gets to color six.  We may have to find a new tradition, because I felt terrible throwing out all those eggs after Easter this year.  Tossing two dozen eggs will make me feel even worse!

I tried to change things up a bit and bought the marbleized egg kit this year.  I thought it would be like the one we used once or twice as kids where there were some drops of a toluene-smelling substance you put in the water, and the dye floated on top and swirled over the eggs when you dipped them.  I guess that stuff must have proven too toxic or something, because the kit I ended up with was just a nasty mess of dye tablets, and vegetable oil had to be added to the cups of vinegar solution.  I initially thought maybe some of the dye would be organic (from a chemist's standpoint) and dissolve in the floating oil while the water-soluble oil would stay in the water, and the two dyes would make a swirl effect on the egg.  Not so.  Essentially it was just a nasty, oily mess so the eggs came out nice and slippery, the dye dribbled into oily blobs on the picnic table, and the greased up eggs were not pleasant to touch, let alone peel and eat.  I will never do anything "fancy" like that again, unless the package explicitly states that the kit contains the old, wonderfully toxic, toluene-smelling poisonous dye that I loved as a child.

The day before Easter Sunday our church once again hosted the Easter Eggstravaganza.  Lots of candy and plastic eggs later, we came home, and proceeded to allow our children to fulfill their wildest dreams of a sugar high.  Merrilee, ever the conservative one, at a couple of pieces of candy and called it quits.  Katie Mei grabbed a few pieces of chocolate to eat, enjoyed them, and spent the rest of the day asking "Can I have a piece of chocolate? Can I have a piece of chocolate?" over and over.   Jacob not only finished all the candy from his Easter egg hunt at school three days prior, but he also finished every piece of candy from the Saturday egg hunt.  On Sunday, he finished all the candy received in his Easter basket.  There is no stopping that boy when he has candy waiting around to be eaten.  In the past I've tried to limit his intake, but then I have to keep watch to prevent him from sneaking it when he's not allowed to have it.  I now feel it's better to just let him feast, and then spend the next two weeks watching his sisters slowing nibble their stashes away.  Maybe one day he'll get it.

After church on Easter Sunday I made the kids suffer through sitting for a few photos.  Wasn't much of a photo session, but at least I got a few pics of them cleaned up and smiling.

Hope you all had a blessed Easter, too.  Now, onto summer....