Good Eggs - for reals!

I know, you are all waiting for the photos of Ben's birthday party...but my particular brand of OCD compels me to follow chronological order. And before his party Saturday morning, we dyed Easter eggs Friday evening. (ps - Notice how light it is outside! Pretty crazy, seeing as we still need to wear coats...)

Aaron, who is a relative newbie to dying eggs (his first time was when we dyed them with Leah!), has taken to the ceremony of it all. He makes a "name" egg for each person present. This year he was also really into using the wax crayon to make designs. Not content with simple swirls, he asked Ben for ideas - and got handed the assignments of "family" and "train". Done, and done!

Leah got to dunk them all by herself this year - she was pretty proud of herself!

Ben checks out "his" egg.

And demonstrates how long his hair is! He's starting to lean toward the Wolverine style again...

Not sure why this one got turned sideways, but these are the name eggs. What we learned this year is that Mommy should NOT try to help. I made Leah's, the front yellow one. Can you see her name? Yeah, me neither. If I'd chosen blue like mine, it would have stood a chance. Maybe.

What Mommy DOES like to do is try different dying techniques. In one of my magazines this year I saw an idea that looked promising. You dye an egg, then let it dry, and then wrap cheesecloth around it (I used twist ties to secure it). Then you spoon a contrasting color of dye over the top and let it dry again. For these, I used a double thickness of cheesecloth, and I probably let them sit too long in the first round of dye. If I had more to experiment with, I could play around with those factors. At any rate, they look pretty and weren't hard at all.

Our dozen. I take photos like these of decorated cookies and such, then cut them into shapes to use as borders on my scrapbook pages. They add some nice color and give a feel for what was accomplished, but without taking up the room of an actual photo.

In the next couple of days, I will post photos from the big birthday, and also some from Easter, with us in our coordinated outfits. I can almost hear your anticipation!