EGGcellent!

We decorated Easter eggs this morning, and they turned out beautiful!  I was concerned about dying brown eggs, but honestly, I think I might like the deep colors the brown eggs produced more than the lighter colors my white eggs have produced in the past.  (I'll show you the difference later so you can see for yourself...)

Instead of boiling our eggs on the stove as I've always done in my life, I decided to give the oven method a go.  It worked perfectly, and depending on how they taste, I might be going this route from now on, because not one of my eggs was cracked at the end of cooking time.  For whatever reason, when I boil eggs on the stove, at least one is always cracked by the end of the process.  I laid the eggs in a muffin/cupcake pan and then popped these babies in a 325 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.  Then, I ran them under cool water in a strainer, dried them with a towel, and put them in the fridge back in the egg cartons until we were ready to color them.

We had our friends, the Rawls family, come over and color eggs with us!  Thanks to my sweet friend, Cassie, I have many of the following pictures, because she randomly picked up my camera and took pictures of us this morning.  :)

He was told to look up at the camera for a picture, so he did real quick with this precious smile, and then his head dove right back down into his coloring business.  He didn't miss a beat.  That's my boy!  I've been training him to smile and pose on cue.  ;)

So I tried to be more creative and stick round stickers on an egg in hopes that I would be able to peel them off after coloring it to end up with a polka dotted egg, but this is what I found when I checked on the egg...  The darn stickers wouldn't stay stuck to the egg and were just floating around.  ugh.

 I looked down at him, saw he was squishing the egg, and asked him what he was doing.  "The egg is hatching!"  With an answer like that, how could I not go along with it?  This is why you'll see an egg missing from a carton below.  :)

Sooooooo, this happened.

He was moving a cup,

 it spilled everywhere, the egg plopped onto the ground,

 and I ran to grab towels.

 While I was gone, he took advantage of the situation (Wouldn't you too if you were him?!) and began splashing the orange mess everywhere.

 Oh.My.Word.

 I love his face in this picture.  While I was screaming inside about the huge mess and dirty kid, I knew that that wouldn't make the situation better or clean up the mess.  So I allowed him to enjoy the moment of being 3 years old and silly, and a funny thing happened....I laughed about it too.  I'm so glad that my friend took pictures of this sequence, because it makes me giggle again looking back.

He looks so big to me in this picture...

 Oh, you're going to smile for the camera, Parker.  Wiggly fingers are always helpful with a ticklish 2 year old.  :)

 

 

 Here are our finished eggs!  I LOVE THE WAY THEY TURNED OUT!  I love how vibrant and deep the colors are.  Perfection!  Brown eggs=success!
Compare these eggs with the eggs in the very last photo on this post (those were the white eggs we colored last year) to see how using a brown egg vs. a white egg will turn out!

 I especially love the imperfections in them.  :)

 EXTRAORDINARY EGGS, I tell ya!

I'm inviting you to go back in time with me one year ago.  It's amazing the difference a year makes.  Check out these babies coloring eggs last year, and then scroll back up to them this year to see the size difference.  This makes me  :)  and  :(  at the same time.  Time is flying by, people.  I'm so glad I had a crazy camera toting mom who took tons of pictures when I was growing up to set an example for me to do the same with my family.  I love looking back at old pictures of my boys.  These boys make my world go round.  :)