Eggcellent Afternoon Ends When Mom Cracks Under Pressure

I LOVE holidays. I love them all, but I especially love the big ones: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Fourth of July, Mother's Day, and Mole Day (look it up). Christmas is by far my favorite of the big holidays, and I really get pumped for Christmas. This past year I was rocking out to my Nat King Cole, "The Christmas Song" CD before Thanksgiving had even arrived, and let me tell you "rocking out" to Nat King Cole is not something a Christmas Enthusiast could do, it takes a seasoned Yuletide Warrior! I also had one Christmas tree fully decorated before Thanksgiving, again something I do not recommend to amateur Christmas Revellers as you could become overwhelmed by the fast approaching holiday and start "Scrooge-ing." For those of you who are thinking, "Danielle is so wise. I'm going to decorate early this year," consider yourself warned. You need multiple Epic Christmases under your belt and a healthy infusion of Bruce Springsteen's version of "Merry Christmas, Baby" (my FAVORITE secular Christmas song) before you can begin the holiday season early.

I had Ian sooooo pumped up for Christmas, or as he says it, "Goofus", as well. It was awesome. Our house was teeming with Christmas Cheer. All we talked about was Christmas, all we did was get ready for Christmas, and all I dreamed about was sugarplums. By the time Christmas Day arrived we had FOUR fully decorated Christmas throughout the house, three full nativity scenes, garland draped along anything stationary, stockings on all of the bedroom doors, wreaths on the exterior doors, jingle bells on the door knobs, etc., etc., etc. I had somehow shoved approximately three Hobby Lobby stockrooms into our 1388 square foot house. And, in the end, we had the best Anderson Christmas yet! It's so much more fun with the boys, especially now that they are getting to the point of understanding things like this.

What does this have to do with the "Eggcellent Afternoon"? Well, this past weekend I wanted to begin pumping ourselves up for Easter, the most important of Christian holidays. When I first started thinking about creating our own gaggle of Easter eggs, I had these grand visions of how egg decorating would go. Take a moment to engross yourself in my vision. Cue the 1950's sitcom music...........

(This vision is brought to you in black and white) There I was, in a dress, full make-up, and heels protected by a floral apron sinched tightly around my delicate 24 inch waist. Hey, I said this was a vision, not reality. Alright, back to the vision. I open the back door and call, "Boys, it's time to decorate the eggs. Are you ready?" Ian responds, "Yes, mother. We're coming!" Into the kitchen dash my two adorable boys, not a hair out of place on their perfectly groomed little heads. Both are wearing freshly pressed short sleeved, button down shirts tucked into their khaki shorts held up by their little black leather belts. Oh, how adorable. They've been outside playing with our golden retriever, "Lucky", while Cole gazes at them adoringly and reads the paper. Cole might have been smoking a pipe. I'm not entirely sure as I could not see him behind the trellis of the gorgeous flower garden I have cultivated in my spare time. Anyway, Ian and Eli both climb onto their respective step stools, and there we stand, dying the eggs every beautiful color under the sun, creating gorgeous patterns that would make Martha Stewart green with envy. Nobody spills a drop of dye anywhere in the kitchen and definitely not on their clothes. Eventually, we have colored all of the eggs and the result is a display worthy of the cover of "House Beautiful." I kiss each boy on his rosy little cheek and send them off to have more fun outside while I giddily clean the kitchen because life does not get better than having the distinct privilege of cleaning a kitchen.

SLAP!!!! Back to reality and full-blown technicolor, you!

Now that you have experienced the vision, you want to know how it really went, don't you? Well, it went about as well as decorating eggs with two small children possibly could. We started by going to Hobby Lobby to buy the eggs and all the fixin's. After a very extensive and thorough 2 minute Google search, I decided on buying plastic eggs and decorating them with googly eyes, felt, and pom poms to make an entire barnyard of animals. Keep in mind, that at this point I'm still more or less living the vision only with plastic eggs and therefore no egg dye which is close enough to still have a swell 1950's afternoon.

At Hobby Lobby we had great success. Not only did we find everything we needed to create barnyard masterpieces, we also found stickers that would allow us to create pirate eggs as Ian's favorite show right now is, "Jake and the Neverland Pirates". "Oh, this is going to be fabulous!", I'm still thinking.

When we got home I couldn't wait to set up our little assembly line. I had everything ready to go in the living room on the boys' little picnic table. I divided the eggs by size because what 16 month-old doesn't get irritated when different sized eggs are in the same bowl? Next, I began opening all of the eggcessories. At this point I had to take "before" pictures. I wanted to have a digital record of the incredible transformation these eggs were about to undergo.

The eggs in their humble beginnings

The wonderful eggcessories

The chaos started off slowly. The eggs began intermingling with eggs of other sizes. Why in the world does this matter? I don't know, but on Saturday afternoon it did and if I'm being totally honest, it would matter to me on any day at any time. But, instead of continuously sorting the eggs into their "proper" bowls, I only sorted maybe 17 times and then gave up. It was during one of these sorts that I realized Eli was eating the pom poms. Part of me is very disturbed by a child who will eat pom poms but gags on strawberries. The other part of me has already raised Ian through this stage, but was no less surprised to see Ian eating them as well.

This is the point where things became a little crazy. While I was digging the soaking wet pom poms out of Eli's frighteningly sharp teeth, I fell under a googly eye attack. I was hit once, twice, three times. The hits were becoming closer together and each new hit was delivered with more gusto than the previous. I quickly extracted my shredded finger from my little Eli-gator's mouth and turned to see Ian. He had the entire bag of googly eyes and was swinging them wildly with no regard for the safety of any Anderson family member. He had that crazy, "I'm two-years-old" look in his eye, and I had to act fast or risk being pummeled by the remaining googly eyes. I lunged, and he was quick to react, but I was quicker. As I grabbed his small yet determined wrist I simultaneously stripped him of all ammunition. He didn't know what had hit him. As quickly as I had realized I was under siege, I had overcome the enemy and neutralized the situation. Unfortunately, we lost many brave googly eyes that afternoon, and as I sit here writing about it, the whole thing seems surreal.

After a quick debriefing we went right back to decorating our eggs. I thought that perhaps using foam shape stickers was a better idea for the rest of the afternoon. This would be entertaining and educational at the same time. We can practice shapes with the stickers and there is no way you can't get a sticker to stick to an egg. Ha! Once again, my children had proven me to be a moron. Eli demonstrated how by first sucking on the foam sticker for an extended period of time, you can render the adhesive useless and would have better luck getting a feather to perform a complex calculus integration than getting a sticker to remain on the egg. Ian took the opposite approach and focused his efforts on the eggs. I'm not totally sure, but I believe he was actually trying to suck all of the color out of his egg.

An artist at work

Short of twirling a fire baton while a chorus line of foam sticker covered eggs performed high kicks behind me, I tried every tactic I could think of to build this overwhelming excitement about putting stickers on the eggs. It did not work. It wasn't even acknowledged. I didn't even have any eggs to take "after" pictures of because none were decorated. I tried to comfort myself by thinking, "Undecorated eggs are just as much fun to hunt for as decorated eggs."

After what felt like 6 hours of "decorating" (I think it was actually closer to 30-45 minutes) I held up my white flag of surrender and went to make dinner. I so desperately wanted Saturday afternoon to be a scene right out of the movie "Pleasantville", that I forgot that my boys are YOUNG, very young. It wasn't a bad afternoon, it just wasn't what I had created in my mind. And while I may not have gotten my picture perfect Spring afternoon on April 9, 2011, there's always next year. :)