Signs of Spring, Egg dyeing, and Easter egg hunt of epic proportions...

 *Deep breath* The smell of flowers in the air. The warm sunshine on my face. The beautiful bright green I'm starting to see everywhere... yes, it's spring!

The other day, my family continued our annual tradition of dyeing Easter eggs. In years past, there have been various fiascos surrounding this tradition, including one year in which not only the eggs got dyed, but the carpet as well! This year, the fiasco didn't involve the eggs, but it did happen while we were dyeing... Our plumbing decided to start moving backwards. Not cool! I'll spare you the dirty details and share with you this photo instead. I'd just like to take a moment to say that my father is amazing. He's not afraid to get his hands dirty, (very, very, very dirty in this case!) and he's pretty much just awesome! All in all, he handled this disastrous situation quite well I thought. 

                 

Enough with the not-so-nice part of that day. Back to egg dyeing. I must say, I'm pretty serious when it comes to my Easter eggs. I think I took at least twice as long as everyone else in my family. I study each one of my eggs carefully before submerging them in the brightly colored dye. I rarely just dip and dunk and see what happens. Oh no. There is almost always a carefully thought out strategy as to which color needs to be applied first, the proper way to hold each egg, and for how long the egg should spend in each bowl of color. I also have to say, I think I'm a little bit of an egg-dyeing "purist". As in, I think that the true talent is getting the egg to be beautiful without lots of extra help e.g. stencils, stickers, glitter etc. Now remember, I did say I'm just a little bit of a purist- I did break down and use foil on some of my eggs this year, but I think I'm always most proud when my egg is beautiful simply because of my mastery of the dye. I was rather pleased with how mine turned out this year, and lest you be tempted to think that they look like everyone else's eggs at Easter, just remember that there was thought, and design for each and every egg!

These are my brother, Ian's eggs. He went on and on about what a beast he was at egg-dyeing, and how his were the best. I have to politely disagree, but they are quite lovely!

And these are mine!!!! My striped eggs seriously made my day!



After the egg dyeing, my amazingly cool mother did something awesome...
She prepared an egg hunt for her 4 adult children! Awesome!!! (Ok, we're not all adults, but the youngest of us is 13 which I think is still way too old for egg hunts). You have no idea how exciting this was for me! There we were with our baskets, tense and ready to bound from the house at the sound of "Ready, set, GO!"
Oh the thrill of the hunt! Oh the joy of finding one of those brightly colored treasures peeking out from behind a fence post! Oh the excitement of hearing the rattle of little jelly beans just waiting to be eaten! (Can you tell, there's a part of me that's very definitely stuck in 1st grade?)

Oh my goodness! I'm so excited!

Don't be scared. That's my excited face, not my "I'm going to eat you" face.

Cute little Sagey

Of course, it wouldn't be a real egg hunt without us losing track of one of the eggs. As hard as we tried, we could not locate the final egg. You wouldn't think that neon would blend in very well but...

And then it rained. A lot.

I'd like to say we were hard core, and continued the search until the egg was found... but we didn't. We retreated to the house with our buckets over our heads and contented ourselves with chocolates and jelly beans. So somewhere out there, tucked away in just the right hiding place, there's a lime green Easter egg that didn't want to be found. 

Wherever you are little egg- be free!

~Jazzy