Pennies In My Couch: Caught Blue-Handed

Easter kind of snuck up on me this year. I don't mean that I was unprepared for it- I had done my shopping weeks in advance and had everything all ready to go for the big day. It snuck up on me in the sense that I had forgotten all about one of the most fun-for-kids parts of Easter preparation: Dying Easter Eggs! Luckily I was reminded of this fun event (thank you, facebook!) just in time to make it to the grocery store to get some eggs and make it back home to boil them! I mean it when I said I had prepared... I already had the egg dye at home hiding with the other Easter stuff I had bought... but you can't buy eggs too far in advance. Dave will eat them. And he makes fun of me if I label things with DO NOT EAT, but he will eat something if it's not labeled. Labeling probably wouldn't help, anyway. Especially since going out of my way to tell him that the eggs were for coloring didn't even save them... he ate one before they even made it to the dye!

I love that man ;)

Anyway... of course I invited Baby Luke to join us, along with my sister, brother, mom and dad and Grammy, too! As soon as they got here we got started. Jack is very into recipes and following directions and instructions, so this year I decided that I would let him help me prepare the colors rather than just plopping the colors down in front of him. I set up the table in the backyard, filled the glasses with the right amount of water, and then had him help me measure the vinegar and drop the colored tabs into the glasses and let him stir the water to dissolve the tabs.

That took For.E.Ver. Next year I am going to experiment beforehand to see which brands of egg dye dissolve faster, because I ended up getting a knife from the kitchen to break up the tabs into tiny pieces, and even then they still didn't fully dissolve until we were halfway done! That's a long time for an almost-3 year old to wait!

Sammy was too tired (and too little) to help, and Luke was much more likely to eat the dye than use it to color eggs, so they mostly just sat on the sidelines being adorable along with Grammy's Lucy.

Jack cracked me up when he was dropping the eggs (very carefully!) in the dye... he'd totally flinch every time he dropped an egg in the dye! I remembered that he had done that same thing last year, but I still don't know why. Either he was afraid that he'd break the egg and somehow felt that flinching would prevent the egg from breaking? Or maybe he was flinching because he was afraid that the splash would be huge and he'd get dye all over the place...? I have no idea, but it was pretty cute and pretty funny :)

He did really well with the little wire egg-carrier-thingie.

After a little bit, though, I told him that it was okay for him to use his hands.

As it turns out, not only did this particular dye set take For.E.Ver to dissolve in the water/vinegar, it also stains.

A lot.

When he was done coloring his eggs, he admired his handiwork, and then I had him dump out the dyes into the rocks on the side of the house.

Luke wandered over

And watched Jack and grandma put stickers on the colored eggs

And we were done!

After we colored eggs, no one was quite ready to leave yet so we hung out and played in the backyard! Grandpa had come over right as we were finishing with the eggs, so he and Jack practiced "jumping" off the stump in the backyard (yes I realize that shirt is waaay too small for him- he had never worn it and I wanted to protect the shirt that he had been wearing from the egg dye, so grabbed this one).

We all gathered around Luke to try to capture his first words on video(which, much to his mommy's disappointment, was not 'mama' but was 'Uncle Travis'), and I, of course, tried to get him to say 'Aunt Becca' as his second words