Easter Egg Coloring

Tonight, I officially became a mom.

Well, maybe I’ve been a mom for a little more than 2 years, but I definitely entered another stage of Being a Mom. 

I colored Easter eggs with Jack tonight.  It’s a right of passage for all mothers.  I chose not to do it last year when he was 15 months simply because I was am too cheap and lazy.  I figured he wouldn’t know what he was missing yet anyway.

This year, I was excited to get a basket for him and color eggs with him. Being too cheap, I didn’t go for any fancy name brand dying kit.  I bought store brand food colors (liquid –which is hard to find these days) and some eggs.  Nothing more simple than that. I was ready to color eggs!

But this morning I realized I didn’t know how to dry the eggs after dipping them.  The fancy name brand boxes have holes that let you prop the eggs up to dry.  I knew putting them back in the carton would smudge up the color, and I was completely forgetting that I own 2 drying racks for baking that I could have used.  Duh! 

After an all-call to my Facebook friends, Dani, an old high school friend (also a mama to a 2 year old little SMARTIE sweetheart.  That little girl’s vocabulary blows Jack’s completely out of the water, and Jack’s pretty advanced for his age) suggested cutting up an empty toilet paper roll and prop the eggs on those little circles.  I remembered having just put a paper towel roll in the recycling, so I went ‘dumpster diving’ in my recycling bag and got the roll out to use.  I cut it up into 12 equal parts (that was totally by luck since I didn’t measure anything) and glued them together thinking that would give them more stability (and keep Jack’s little curious hands from grabbing them and throwing them all over the kitchen). 

Could I have used a few more parenthesis in that last paragraph?  (probably not)

Here’s what my ‘drying rack’ invention looked like and us getting started with the whole process.

Where’d the eggs go?

After placing our first dyed egg onto a ring, I quickly realized that having them so close together wasn’t such a good idea.  I should have kept them separate from each other.  Oh well.  It worked just fine in the end.

Here is what our colored eggs looked like.  I think they turned out pretty good.  It’s easy as pie to do.  If you don’t know how, just put a tsp of vinegar in 1/2 cup of boiling water and then add as much food coloring as you want in the water.  I used a LOT of color, since the directions on the box said to add about half a bottle of coloring to the water.  That was too much in my opinion.

Jack loved to see the colors as they came out of the water.  He was so excited about the white eggs changing to new colors.