Having some Eggcellent fun!

Indulge me for a moment--I realize we're on the downside of May, but I'm furiously trying to catch up my blog from April. I just can't let these super cute pictures go to waste! My kids were SO excited about dying Easter Eggs this year. Maura has been asking to dye eggs since LAST year when I purchased some dye kids on clearance and she realised that they came with glitter. I kept the kits in the pantry and she'd pull them out at least once a month and ask if she could dye eggs. I'm not sure why I didn't just boil up a few and let her--oh, wait, maybe it's because they make a gigantic mess when they dye eggs. Check out the hands on this kid. I was pretty sure they were going to be a beautiful purple addition to her Easter dress.

I adopted a dyeing technique that I saw a friend use last year with her kids. I thought that safeguarding the eggs in a wire wisk was a brilliant and simple idea that would prevent all of Tristan's eggs from having huge multicolored cracks. Boy, did I underestimate my son. He managed to crack most of the eggs despite my best efforts! There were a lot of eggs too--I'm not sure what possessed me to purchase 18 eggs for each child. I thought we'd never eat all the eggs. The kids promised me that they LOVED hard boiled eggs. They ate their first ones without complaining, and then neither child ate another egg. That means that Brent and I were stuck with 34 eggs to consume between the two of us!

Here's what Bennett did while we dyed eggs. He sat very quietly and consumed four biter biscuits. Oh, he wasn't so quiet between each biscuit--he put up a fuss until he was handed his next biscuit and then he quietly got down to the business of devouring it!

Below: Tristan was so proud of his finished projects. I carefully wrapped some of the most broken in the colored foil and I later heard him tell Maura, "I wapped my egg in the pretty wap."

Maura is my artist and she had such a wonderful time with her project. Maura's eggs ended up a pretty uniform purple with glitter. It does not surprise me in the least!

I hope that we made some wonderful memories with our Easter traditions. I have sweet memories of my childhood egg dying experiences. I hope my kids will remember the fun we had doing projects together--otherwise it's not worth the mess!

Below: That same week, we had some decent weather and I opted for LOTS of outdoor play to get the kids up and moving. Bennett LOVES his new swing and can spend hours just swinging.

The big kids got to take part in a completely new experience. I realized this spring that I've never let them play in mud. I have memories of coming back home as a child, gloriously dirty and happy as a lark. I've been really restrictive of my kids in this regard and have always tried to keep them away from mud. This spring, however, mud was pretty unavoidable. One afternoon, I dressed them in their scruffies, turned the water hose on some dirt and let them go to town. My only rule was that they weren't to throw it! They had a blast getting dirty!

Who would have thought that my boy would be my clean child? He can't stand to have his hands dirty for long and he kept asking me to wash off his hands so that he could keep playing in the mud. Perhaps we'll have to keep practicing this getting dirty thing!