Easter Egg Chaos

The Easter Egg dying...I've learned this is one of those "family fun" activities that you idealize and people post about it on social media making it look awesome and fun but it's generally a fiasco.  The younger the kids, the bigger the fiasco.  This year, Ben and Tessa were quite civilized and fun while dying eggs.  They know how to gently ease the eggs in the cups instead of dropping them from six inches above and splashing dye everywhere.  They care about design and color.  They don't break eggs with carelessness.  They were so excited to dye eggs they asked about it all day. They monitored the boiling of the eggs, the cooling and the drying.  It would have been a fun activity...but...there was also a two year old and a baby involved.  I almost waited until a time when Milo was sleeping to do this but I thought he's two and a half...he should be part of the fun.  The other kids dyed eggs at that age.  Well...he was a nightmare. He wanted to dip his hands in the dye and stir the eggs around in the cups with a spoon so I had to hold every up so he didn't spill everywhere.  He cracked his eggs and I thought I could distract him with a shrink wrapped egg but he wanted it "opened" meaning he thought the wrapper should come off.  Finally I distracted him with technology just so he would leave the other two to enjoy themselves.  This morning he broke two more eggs while the other two were at school.  Hopefully they don't notice.

So, here are the eggs the civilized members of the family made.

Ben picked out the kids at Walmart with Justin and they chose a PAWS monster kit and a golden egg one.  The gold one didn't have nearly enough paint for a whole batch but the ones they made are pretty cool 

Surprisingly neat work for the age group...

I kept a few white eggs for my favorite shrink wraps!  Milo broke this little monster this morning...Most of the eggs were two big for the wraps! They were only larges not jumbos so next time I will have to buy mediums.  

Ben was very serious about this activity.

Allan has an annoying habit of dipping his paws in glasses of fresh ice water to get himself a drink.  Usually he only wants water (of course he would take milk but open glasses of milk aren't a regular occurrence around here) but not juice, colas, tea or coffee.  Here he is dipping his paws into and drinking dye water!  I was so annoyed by this...I use vinegar with egg dye tablets before adding the water so the water I imagine tastes like vinegar.  I can't imagine it tasted good. 

He had blue water on his paw!  I haven't checked to see if it stained his delicate white paw.  He deserves it if it did.  

Here is Milo's wreckage from before I stopped the madness and made him do something else.  When this tray finally meets its final days in approximately two years it will be happy to go into the dumpster.  

This is an egg Milo broke and then left on the living room floor.  I don't like to eat hard boiled eggs so I'm not exactly an expert at boiling them although I have learned enough to know you put the eggs in the cold water and then heat the water instead of dropping the eggs into boiling water.  These were obviously not boiled long enough but at least they are solid enough not to run all over the place. We have a hard boiled egg making machine that makes perfect ones but it is packed away in our storage unit along with all our other frivolous small appliances and our Easter decorations. 

I wish we had them because the kids love Easter.  Tessa spent the afternoon playing with fake eggs and an empty 18 pack carton.  

Justin bought them jumbo eggs when they bought the dye.

Milo instead chose this giant sucker full of smaller suckers.  It was a sticky, sticky day for him. 

They even brought this sour gummy work egg with feathers for me!  I let Tessa use the egg for her trinket games.  

Back to the topic of appliances, the fridge I was so proud of myself for "fixing" by doing a huge defrost warmed right back up to 49 degrees over the last few weeks so the last option was to call an appliance repair company.  We really didn't want to resort to that because Justin researched a few of the parts he thought might be malfunctioning and one was $300.  Well...it turns out this guy had a trove of parts for late 90's era Maytags and it only cost $46. It was still in the original box.  I am so relieved.  That fridge has been vexing me for two months.  I REALLY enjoyed my properly chilled Diet Dr. Pepper this afternoon.  I REALLY hope the repair solves the problem long term.  It's hard to believe a fridge from 1997 is now 20 YEARS OLD!  I cleared off the top (if you recall from a New Year's resolution post I did a year or two ago, the top of the fridge is one of my clutter and junk problem areas and it ends up being where we stash things we don't want the kids to get and also food items that don't fit in the cupboards like large bags of generic brand cereal) so the guy didn't end up with a cascade of junk falling on his head if he had to pull it away from the wall.  Allan discovered the open expanse and went ahead and did his wildcat surveillance thing that he does so well. He even went on top of the cabinets and peered over the all into the living room.  No threat detected...time to get down and sleep on the bed. 

Ever since we sold the house we have had a never ending avalanche of maintenance issues including a bad clogged drain (I snaked that nightmare myself!) furnace issues requiring multiple visits from the HVAC company, the fridge, and also our TV has multiple LED bulbs burned out and it has spots on the screen and during the day you can barely see the picture because it is so dark.  At least the TV is not attached to the house.