Finally, the hour was upon us. The eggs were all boiled, cooled and dried. Laid out on the table like 24 blank canvases. I unveiled this year's media: Swirl egg art, glitter egg art, and tye dye egg art! WOO HOO! Until a few years ago, I went with the cheapest simplest plain coloring tablets and we did them like I did when I was little. You wrote messages or drew designs on the eggs with a white crayon, then dipped them. Seeing as I can't draw a recognizable stick man, we mostly had messages. Now, I have raised 3 wonderful uniquely gifted quirky kids. My living room coffee table bears the indelibly etched-in first ever sentence written by the Beast in honor of her twin brother:

SO it wasn't long before the messages on the eggs were less than Christian-like. It was funny, but uncomfortable when someone would drop by and see the assortment of basketed eggs bearing the slogans of "Eldest is gay," and "Beast must die." No one ever copped to the one that said "Crucify her."

So a few years back I decided that I could afford to spend the extra buck and get some of the fancy egg kits. Heck, once a year, right? I thought they might be fun. So this year we had the tye dye egg kit, the swirl egg art and the glitter egg art kits. KOOL!

So, since Beast wasn't around, I decided that this year I wasn't going to force anyone to dye eggs. Nope, it was going to be me and Finchie. Let them remember me at my funeral as the woman who only wanted to have fun family traditions like egg coloring.... So suddenly I see MOTH and Eldest sitting at the table expectantly. Moth pronounced that he was going to do his obligatory ONE egg (mind you, I placed no such obligation on him). Eldest harumphed that he was also going to just do one egg.

Once everyone was at the table, we began. Well...we tried. Seems that we were out of vinegar. I didn't want to do them half-buggered so I sent the boys off to get the smallest container of vinegar they could get. They returned with he smallest container I'd ever seen. And we made it be enough. We decided that since we seemed to have extra dye tablets that we'd double them up for more brilliant colors. The problem is that those little tabs don't always look like the color they wind up being. So we had a bit of a mix up, which sent Finchie into one of his famous giggling jags.

MOTH wrestled for about 40 minutes with the little device that made the tye dye effect. Finally I told him that we should just forget it and use the "basic" method instead of the "advanced." I thought he was going to throw an egg at me! I might add at this point that the "Swirl" kits was a pain in the duff. It's an oil based dye thing that creates a sticky globby effect, and until the pink one dried, it looked like it was covered in some kind of embryonic goo. At any rate, despite all of the grousing at the onset, I do believe that I colored fewer eggs this year than ever!

The magnificent results are below. Complete with a glitter Elvis egg (with glitter side burns), a camouflage/khaki "war" egg, and the obligatory message egg, done in glitter paint. ~sigh~

None of them as professionally beautiful as the ones above, but not one of those up there has the love, giggles and memories associated with it as ours. I love family traditions.

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