Egg-asperating Easter

My kids' picky eating habits have been well documented on this blog. Well, it's time to add another food to the list. Hard-boiled eggs. They love scrambled eggs, fried eggs and cookie dough containing raw eggs but they won't touch a hard-boiled egg with a ten foot pole. And this time I can't blame it on my husband....I know it's my fault.

I don't like eggs in general. The thought of eating an animal embryo just kind of grosses me out. I will eat fried eggs if they are over hard and have absolutely NO liquid coming out of them....and are covered in ketchup. I also like scrambled eggs if they are cooked really dry. But I have never liked hard-boiled eggs. I'll eat a few stray pieces of one that ends up in my salad but I would never just eat one as is. That said, I love devilled eggs....moslty because of the mayonaise, which is the same reason that Brian hates them.

Suffice it to say that hard-boiled eggs have never been a menu item at our house. Which is a problem when it comes to Easter. What do I do with 3 dozen pink, blue, green and purple hard-boiled eggs? I might as well just throw them all out, because nobody here is going to eat them. I used to take devilled eggs to our Easter dinners, but that only works every other year when we are with my family. When we are with Brian's family his Grandma is famous for her delicious devilled eggs, so I can't bring mine.

My solution: Leave them raw. Yep, we hunted raw eggs last year and this year...with varying degrees of success. The dyeing process has worked fine with the raw eggs. In two years (and including a 2 year old in the fun) we haven't broken any eggs while dyeing them. Last year we hunted them all without breaking a single one either. But this year was different story.

#1 it was too cold to hunt the eggs outside. #2 Brian, as usual, couldn't be around for the big egg hunt because of his duties at church. #3 I was videotaping. I don't like to hear my disembodied voice on the tapes later when we watch them back so I try not to talk while I'm taping. This leads to a ridiculous series of futile hand motions and finger snapping which make for a very shaky picture and leaves me unable to scream warnings at the children who are about to drop raw eggs on my carpet. As a matter of fact when we watch this year's tape we will hear several series of grunts and sighs and see my hand reach out to resuce an egg or two from certain destruction many times.

Yes, we had three eggs broken this year. Two on the carpet. One in the middle of the room.

My 9 year old dropped and broke the very first egg he touched, just 30 seconds after the big speech about being careful and remembering that the eggs are raw and will break easily. That egg landed behind an end table and up against the baseboard so I wasn't too worried about it. I let the kids continue hunting while I recorded it all for posterity. We managed to find all of the other eggs without incident....except for the last one.

The last egg was up on a shelf. I felt sorry for Kinley because her brothers had only let her find 4 or5 eggs. I asked Ryker to help her climb up on her little table to retrieve the final egg while I was busy cleaning up the first egg mess. She climbed the table and got the egg with no problem but on the way down she dropped it and it broke right on her table. No big deal. However, as she was climbing off of the table she stepped in her basket and crushed another egg....right through the wicker weave of the basket and into my carpet!! Luckily at that point Brian got home from first service at church and helped contain the kids and get breakfast on the table while I cleaned up the eggs.

So now I'm left with the question of what to do next year. My mother-in-law suggested plastic eggs. We do hide plastic eggs full of candy every year too, but the kids want to dye eggs and hunt for their special colored eggs as well as the plastic kind. I think we will just have to brave the cold (since apparently it will never be warm on Easter in Illinois unless they move it to July)and hunt outside in our parkas next year. It was so nice to use our Easter eggs for our French Toast and scrambled eggs for breakfast, the homemade bread I took for the Easter meal and a dozen things since then. I hate to give up the convenience, but if I'm going to spend Easter morning on my hands and knees scrubbing the carpet it isn't worth it.