Yesterday I helped Nick decorate Easter Eggs.

This was another one of those crazy, parent driven things. Like visiting Santa. Nick would never had noticed if we hadn't done it. He doesn't understand Easter, or the eggs, or the Easter Bunny. But some part of me, the part that remembered decorating Easter Eggs as a kid, had a NEED to show Nick the joy of getting his fingers stained with artificial dye.

Personally, my favorite Easter Eggs as a kid were the ones I decorated with Larissa. Her mother is originally Ukranian, and they had the whole set up beeswax and strang dyes... making an egg would take hours - days. But it was fun, and it was worth it. Compared to that, dumping your egg in "the blue cup" and then having a plain blue egg is just not the same thing.

But since Nick is just 22 months old, I figured regular old easter egg dye would be fine.

It was a fiasco.

First of all, I needed to phone my mother to ask her about the eggs - would they go bad in the fridge if I hard boiled them now? Then I had to look up how to hard boil and egg in The Joy of Cooking. I did have the presence of mind to boil the eggs ahead of time and let them cool.

Then the FUN began. I let Nick watch as I put vinegar and lemon juice in with the tablets of fizzy dye. I poured water in the cups. Nick wanted to drink them. I took out an egg and placed it in one of the cups. Nick wanted to hold an egg. "Bird?" he kept saying. I showed him how the egg was a little colored. I gave him stickers to put on the eggs. He would get so excited he would smash the egg he was holding agains the table. He wanted to put all the ggs inside the cups at the same time and stir with the egg dipper thingy. All in all, it was me decorating a few less than 2 dozen easter eggs while trying to keep Nick from smashing them all on the table.

He had a good time with it, which is what counts. But it was the most stressful fifteen minutes I had experienced in a long while. I would have taken pictures to go with this post, but until I hire a full time photographer to follow me around and document my life, there is no way I am ever going to capture most of these moments. My hands are full LIVING them.