Phriday Photo Phun - Eggstra Eggciting!

Ye Annual Dyeing of the Easter Eggs, 2009!

Kiddo's getting better at dyeing just the egg, and not her hands/shirt/pants/the table/the floor anymore:





I seem to remember the Paas egg kits coming with a "clear" crayon for marking the eggs before dyeing, so the writing would magically appear when the egg was lifted out of the cup. There wasn't a crayon in this kit, but we made do with a white one out of Kiddo's vast crayon collection. Worked like a charm.



Kiddo is old enough now to manage the trickier egg-dyeing maneuvers, like the two-color egg, without any difficulty:



Ta da! The artist and her finished work!



Okay, okay, I confess - I dyed three of the dozen myself, including the dark yellow one third from the right on the bottom row. Two I dyed as exemplars for Kiddo (for the double-dipping and crayon techniques) and the dark yellow one was in homage to my childhood. (If this were an early-season episode of Lost, this is the point at which we'd zoom in for an extreme close-up of my eyes as I did the Flashback Stare.....) See, back in the day (that day being in the mid-70s), my next-oldest sister and I would watch those classic Rankin-Bass Easter TV specials each year (you remember, the ones that had this at the beginning:

Man, that always got us SOOOOO excited!) and our favorite of all the Easter programming (sorry, Jesus) was Here Comes Peter Cottontail. Now, in HCPC, there was a Bad Bunny who sabotaged Peter and turned his eggs all a horrible, dark green at one crucial point of the story (sorry if this is a spoiler, but come on now, the special is as old as I am....). Anyhow, that was our favorite part of the special, and each year when we were dyeing our Easter eggs, my sister and I would try to dye one so dark green that it would come out like the Bad Bunny's egg. (Wikipedia helpfully reminds me that the Bad Bunny's name is January Q. Irontail, and he was voiced by the fantabulous Vincent Price, just in case there was any doubt as to his villainy.) Anyhow, each year when we had finished dyeing our dozens (yes, plural - we usually did 4 dozen, though some years we did only 3 dozen) of eggs, Mom would start to collect up the dye cups to pour them down the sink and thusly discover our Irontailesque attempt. Invariably, she'd chastise us and toss that egg out, but one year, one glorious year, we hatched a plan (hatched! an egg pun! woo!) wherein we ever-so-generously offered to clean up after ourselves when done with the dyeing. Mom, who should've known enough to be suspicious of any such offer from the likes of us, was apparently sleep deprived enough that year (as my youngest sister was then just a baby) that she agreed and summarily left us alone in the kitchen. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! We proceeded to pour several of the darkest dyes together - green, blue, purple - and dunked the last undyed egg, which we'd hidden away (easy enough for Mom to lose count when there were so many eggs being colored), into the cup. We then hid the cup on the back of a shelf, tucked behind the flour canister where it wouldn't be discovered. After dinner, I snuck back into the kitchen, retrieved the egg from the shelf and stuck it in the fridge with the rest of its brethren to await the arrival of the Easter Bunny.

It was a total triumph - the Easter Bunny (who may or may not have borne a strong resemblance at the time to our dad...) never noticed the peculiar dye job on that one egg and just hid it along with the rest of them the next morning. During the Easter egg hunt that year, my sister and I could barely contain our glee as we searched for the egg. It came out a most putrid blackish-green, as you might expect, and we were positively cackling when we came upon it in the back yard. My mom (again, in all probability rather sleep-deprived) went to peel it in the kitchen after the hunt was over and was horrified to discover that the dye had penetrated through the shell, rendering the white and even the yolk a nasty grayish green color (and yes, that egg did get tossed and was not eaten). (Though, there were other years when we wouldn't manage to find all the eggs - even with Dad's "list from the Easter Bunny" of where things had been hidden - and then weeks later, one of the dogs would find and eat that missing egg, only to return it to us in the form of voluminous vomiting a short time later, usually inside on a carpet.)

Anyhow, we wound up telling Mom what we'd done, and surprisingly enough, not only were we not reprimanded, but from that year on, we were allowed to try to dye one egg as dark as we could, always trying to outdo that first year (we never quite managed) and that egg was thereafter known as the Heather Egg. So, in honor of the Heather Egg, I dropped one egg into the yellow dye and left it there as long as Kiddo would let me. Once she grew impatient with my dye-hogging, I pulled it out. It still got fairly dark, though, dontcha think?



Now, I didn't fully explain why I was hogging the yellow dye to Kiddo, but I did tell her it was something her aunt and I used to do when we were kids. Goodness knows, Kiddo has already heard her share of "back when I was a kid" stories out of me. Heck, some of them she can even repeat back to me, like the story of How Mommy Got That Scar on Her Cheek (subtitle: The Time Mommy and Aunt A Didn't Listen to Grandma and Scratched Their Chicken Pox Spots) though I have plenty more saved up for future use... I mean, Kiddo isn't quite six yet, I can't burn through my whole repertoire now, or whatever will I have to pull out and use during the teenage years?

I wonder if that special is still around - maybe it's on DVD......... off to Google it I go!




For more Phriday Photo Phun, drop by Candid Carrie's, and wish her congratulations on the adoption finalization of her youngest two kids while you're there!