Easter Eggs are for Painting....

So we've been hosting Easter egg hunts on Easter Sunday for the past three years--mostly because I like to hold off on the egg hunts until Easter has actually arrived which pretty much means we have to have one at our house since everyone else already did theirs. 

Last year we did confetti eggs for the grown ups inspired by this oh happy day party.  I filled our eggs with fruity pebbles instead of confetti which was great because one, my yard wasn't covered in confetti and two, the boys were beyond excited since the only cereal they regularly have access to is boring old Cheerios--parenting side note:  if you set the bar low it doesn't take much to thrill your children :)  We also had one glitter-filled egg and whoever had that egg cracked over their head was declared the winner of the hunt and prizes were handed out accordingly.

One of our friends informed us that confetti eggs were actually called cascarones and that when he was growing up his entire extended family saved all of their eggs for the whole year just for this purpose and instead of confetti some of their cascarones were filled with more dubious substances such as flour or syrup or any other messy thing they could think of.  I loved the idea of this family tradition so much I decided to adopt it as our own.....you've gotta do what you've gotta do when you don't have any family traditions of your own to fall back on.  Plus cracking eggs on each other's heads is the perfect tradition for a house full of boys and the fun is in the activity, not in collecting a bunch of junky nonsense from plastic eggs or wasting hard boiled ones.  I think we'll hold off on booby trapping our eggs until the boys are old enough to do their own laundry though.  

After our egg hunt was over last year I realized that I didn't make nearly enough eggs, so this year I saved as many eggs as I could during Lent--whenever I needed one, instead of cracking them open I just used my kitchen scissors to poke a whole in one end and cut out a little circle, then I shook out the egg, rinsed them off and kept them in their containers to await their beautification.    

This week I realized though that since I've been buying organic eggs, my whole supply was brown.  I don't think it will matter for doing the traditional egg dyeing but I wanted to try some different techniques with the boys so I grabbed some white eggs this week.......

....and dumped them all into this measuring bowl to hopefully turn into scrambled eggs for breakfast all week.  I hate the idea of wasting food....even if it is full of yucky growth hormones :)

After trolling around Pinterest for egg dyeing inspiration I found this idea for watercolor eggs--I guess I should have re-read the instructions since they were just painting with the egg dye and I apparently only remembered the title and gave David his actual watercolors.  Oh well, these are super cute and involved much less clean up than mixing up a bunch of dye would have.......

David loved it.  Henry slept through it.  John Michael fussed in the Moby wrap--I don't recommend doing this with a baby tied to you if you can help it.  If you can't help it, don't worry, no one was ever permanently damaged by a few water color drops to the face.....

We're going to start on the rest of our eggs tomorrow with the food coloring method we did last year.  After this painting success I think I'll give the boys paint brushes and let them go to town if (okay, more like when) they get bored waiting for the eggs to soak up the dye.  You know ten minutes is a lifetime when you're two and four.  I'm hoping to have all the eggs colored and dry by Holy Saturday so we can spend the day filling them in preparation for Easter.  I'll let you know how it goes :)

Sorry for writing the longest post ever when all I really wanted to say was this: paint your eggs with watercolors...it's super fun....and not too messy.......the end.