Egg Tales

Spring Break has come and gone and I'm very proud to say that the Preslar Family survived. I'm such a wimp.  Any time a long break with no school shows up on the calendar I start shaking in my boots, sure that the empty days will drag on forever filled with absolutely nothing but the kids tearing each other to shreds and making messes on top of messes.  Do NOT mention the word "Su_ _ _ r" to me please.  And yes, there was a good healthy dose of fighting and messiness, but guess what, Spring Break was really fun this year.  We went nowhere, we just filled up the days with friends and fabulous outings like our first Real Soccer Game and Bundle's first dance class.  We had a little BBQ on a freezing cold night over here and an equally chilly trip to the zoo with friends.  We walked to Einsteins and got bagels and ate them at the park with other friends.  We rented red box movies and ate lots of popcorn.  It was great.  No, the house never really did get clean for the duration of the week (how do you people DO it with a house over 1000 square feet?) but we really did have a great week.

Eggs played a prominent role in our adventures.  Of course we had the egg-dying session that must always happen in the days leading up to Easter.  Yes, as is usually the case with us, it was late the evening before, but it was fun.  It's another one of those times when I have to suppress my inner...okay, OUTER control-freak craft-monger who was aching to make a gorgeous array of perfectly dyed, brightly colored eggs.  I just have to let the kids go for it.  Bundle spent the entire dying-session on just one or two eggs, systematically dunking them in every single color but only after delightedly exclaiming, "Ohh!  Purple!" or whatever color came next.  She produced two very interesting grayish eggs.  And the big kids weren't much different, actually.  They are the funkiest eggs.  And I managed to just leave them to it, and they loved it.

We spent our Saturday morning at a friend's neighborhood egg and candy hunt.  My children successfully restocked our house with colorful little blobs of sugar and chocolate that I am now fighting with myself about all day long.  I'm losing that argument, just so you know. On Sunday morning the kids awoke to more candy and small tokens of adoration such as art projects, a bike helmet for Stomper and new dresses for the girls. I've never done the Easter Dress thing before but I couldn't resist those purple ruffly things at Costco.  I'm glad I didn't - they were adorable. After a lovely church day we spent the afternoon with my parents and my sister eating a completely non-traditional Easter feast of Vietnamese rice noodle and tofu salads.  Hey, when you have to go both vegan and gluten free in a family dinner you have to let the ham and rolls go.  And it was delicious.  Plus, you know...we got more candy.

I have to say that of all the eggs we encountered over spring break what with Easter and all, I had one specific favorite egg of the weekend.  Not everyone in the family loved this egg like I did but Troy and I laughed so hard about this incident that we had to hide while laughing ourselves sick while the victim of the egg was crying in the bathtub.

So, on Sunday morning I was making my favorite thing which is poached eggs.  Bitty decided she didn't want one and instead went with a hard-boiled member of the colored collection made the day before.  I cracked and peeled it for her and placed it on her plate.  She watched it slide around there for a second before picking it up and asking if we could heat it up.  We've had this encounter before and I have told her that putting an already-boiled egg in the microwave is a bad idea but as happens a lot in our mother-daughter relationship she didn't believe me.  She insisted that only 30 seconds wouldn't hurt anything, so I let her put her theory to the test figuring that she was probably right.  She microwaved the egg all by herself and even pulled the plate out and set it down in front of herself.  I had my back turned for a few minutes when I suddenly heard this surprisingly loud "THOOOMPH" sound, followed by a moment of silence before there was an eruption of tears. I turned around to see my sweet daughter absolutely covered head-to-toe in tiny little bits of exploded egg.  In her hair, her eyelashes, down her neck...I'm only laughing because she wasn't burned or hurt at all.  Just heartbroken and probably a little shell-shocked after the explosion of her breakfast.  Troy calmly led her to the bathtub before joining me in the bedroom to laugh silently until tears were running down our cheeks.  Best egg ever.