Easter traditions...

One of the goals for creating a less hectic Easter was to decorate the eggs before Saturday, but that didn't happen. (Christmas and Easter have proven to be extremely hectic for us the past several years. We aren't sure whether the seemingly excessive craziness at these two holidays is really no more hectic than other families experience, or if it's due to pastoring. I guess we'll never know for sure, seeing as we started pastoring and having children at about the same time)!

At any rate, we did cut out some of the unnecessary time-consuming activity of Easter by only decorating 9 eggs! I intended to do a dozen (I think we usually do 2 dozen, simply b/c I have always enjoyed coloring eggs, but 3 of the dozen cracked, leaving us just the 9). Great, unintentional move on my part! They each got to do 4 and I did one, too!
Besides doing pictures the night before, the other intentional great move I made to make Easter more enjoyable was foregoing the Jell-O eggs.

Indulge me while I share this story:
While in high school, my friend Darlene and I had a brain child...creating Jell-O eggs to give to our families. They would be sparkling, bright jewels on a bed of Easter grass, a delightful centerpiece for the Easter dinner table.
Magnificent in the mind, nothing but hard work and ingenuity to create. We started with the age-old practice of blowing out a dozen or so eggs; poking tiny holes in each end of the egg, then blowing the eggs out of the shells into a bowl. (Yes, that is an awful lot of head-ache inducing activity...akin to blowing up several dozen waterballoons. Which is one of the several great reasons why we did this together...no one in their right mind would try all this work by themselves. And no, I don't recall if we had scrambled eggs for dinner that night. Dar, do you remember)? Then, since we were going to be putting Jell-O into those same shells, they certainly needed to be rinsed out. So, we used the now-empty egg as a straw, sucking water from a bowl up into the egg, then shaking and blowing it back out...probably at least 3 times. And then finally, we were ready to add the Jell-O. Again, using the Jell-O like a straw, we sucked the liquid Jell-O into the egg, and we knew it was full when we got a mouth-full of the sugary stuff! Now, you may be wondering how we managed to keep the Jell-O in the egg, seeing as there were holes on each end. A simple solution: Candle wax over the hole on the bottom. If you can imagine what Darlene's kitchen looked like at that point, you can also imagine how gracious her parents were! And then the painstaking process of removing the shells after the Jell-O had hardenend. A great deal of tedious work, all for the experiment of it all. But, the end result was exactly what we had hoped for; smooth, transparent jewels perfect for the celebration. The end.
Actually, not quite the end. The very next year, what appeared on grocery aisles everywhere? Jell-O egg molds. I kid you not. And that's how Wendy and Darlene missed the opportunity to become wealthy inventors...and I've been compelled to make Jell-o eggs, using the traitorous molds, every year since. Until this year. And I was much happier and less stressed because of it. And, happily-or sadly, depending on how you look at it, no one seemed to miss them. The end? Perhaps...