Happy Easter

Today is Good Friday, and I know it is one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, but around here, any Friday off is a good Friday. Of course, having a four day week preceding it is pretty okay, too.

This is Thing 2's egg from yesterday's art lesson at school. She was mad that other some of her classmates liked her idea of sticking on whiskers and ears so much that they did so too. She seriously was asking about copyright infringement laws when she got home.

We went to the Mister's family for dinner today. They live about 40 miles away in a smaller city than ours, but they like to think of it as a big small town. As usual, we were fed large quantities of very good food, with high quality left-overs to take home. My sister-in-law made some spectacular lemon-cream cheese cupcakes, of which I had about 3 and snuck home with 3 more. I guess I'm all set for breakfast tomorrow morning.

As per our Good Friday tradition, the girls and I dyed some Easter eggs this morning. I love dying eggs, and I'm delighted that my kids are as interested in fussy, artsy-fartsy stuff like that as much as I am. We passed a very agreeable hour or so messing about with dyes and eggs and differing techniques and the like.

First of all, we had to boil the eggs. Of course, we don't care about the taste here, we just want them to be less fragile than nature intended. In fact, bulletproof is our goal here. And, naturally, there being such a concept of "too much of a good thing", and us being the kind of people we are, the concept had to be explored thoroughly. Here are a few of the more unfortunate eggs, which quite literally had the snot boiled right out of them.

Now for the dyes. We had a hard time finding egg dying kits this year, for some reason. We ended up getting some ourselves, which were terrible, and some that my mother found at the dollar store. (The crappy ones were pale and didn't dissolve properly, and here at the Loudshoes house, we like things intense.) Here are the dyes, ready for their subjects. Note the prophyllactic use of newspapers under the dyes, because one year we did actually dye the table. (As funky as we tried to see it, it still looked like we had vomited Easter egg dye all over the table. Not an image you want in your head while you're eating.)

The nice thing about dying eggs is that there is no wrong way to do it; any way you want is okay. (Except if you get some of one colour dye into another colour. Apparently, judging from the sound dressing down I got when I did it, mixing colours is a crime justifiably punishable by death in some Third World countries.)

Also, dying eggs is all about the process, and not so much about results. Any results are good. Luckily, these were very satisfying: Now all I have to do this Easter is hide some eggs, (which will be tough, since my children go to bed later than me) and massacre a Lindor bunny.