Easter eggs

We dyed eggs this year with an idea that Nana Montana gave us - skip the store-bought dye and instead use food coloring, plus leaves collected from the yard held next to the eggs with cut-up pieces of nylon stocking and rubber band. It was fun on so many levels - we got to race around the yard finding leaves (and we noticed some very insulted daffodils - like the humiliated grapes in the movie Benny and Joon? - all covered in snow); we got to put our hands in dye and turn them lots of colors, we got to wrangle with rubber bands and nylons and regular stuff in the house, and we got to dye those eggs which didn't roll off the table and become candidates for egg salad. Mike didn't participate because he "hates dying Easter eggs" because of "the smell" and "the mess" and the fact that "you get dye on your face" (no, Mama didn't grow green freckles.)

Grace finished up the project by drawing signs directing the Easter Bunny to the eggs, for ease of hiding. It hasn't yet occured to her that the Easter Bunny relies on lots of child labor to enact the whole Easter-morning egg scenario. Peter was mostly taken with the term "dye" and we had a lot of conversation about how we're "coloring" eggs and there isn't any actual death involved. We did have a conversation recently where he asked, "Do ALL people die?" and when I told him yes, he said, "Even ME?" and I said yes, when you're very very old. He thought a moment and then offered an alternative: he will never get old. A nice loophole, if you can get it, but it's both a sad and profound moment when your kid expresses some inkling of his own mortality.

On the docket for tonight: Hot Cross Buns, since their ridiculously long rising time makes them tricky for making in the morning. They're like scones, only a zillion times more complicated, and we're having a nice brunch with quiche and juice and fruit and buns, which for my money is the best kind of breakfast of all, the hearty brunchy kind. We did Saturday evening church, so Sunday morning is all about looking for eggs and drinking coffee and using the Easter dishes and eating up the chocolate bunnies.