Before getting into this post – Happy merry 27th birthday Adam! Hope you have a grand day and we are thinking of you two provinces over!
Easter. It was a party. Joy, joy, joy! And now we’re on the other side of resurrection hill. We had such a great Easter celebration! Thanks to all who were able to join us in our celebrating – we loved sharing good food and good company!
We bought plastic Easter eggs for the Easter bunny to fill and lo – Easter morning, the bunny must have come by because they had nice little chocolates in them!
We had a lovely brunch at my friend Jacqui’s parents’ place, then we came home and slept more. I mean, what else do you do when you get home from a huge party at 2:30 in the morning? Woke up, had eggs Benedict for supper (nice and simple) then went back to bed for the night.
Monday we had our Easter Lamb! It was awesome – we BBQ’d it and highly recommend that method – it was so juicy and charbroiled. Kate came over to join us, then we watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, just because of the line, ‘What do you mean you DON’T-EAT-NO-MEAT?’ … ‘That’s okay, I make lamb.’ I love that movie.
Tuesday we painted Easter eggs. Towards the end of Holy Week I had been getting flustered thinking of the things I wanted us to do to celebrate Easter and how hard it was going to be to fit it all into one day. Then it hit me – it’s Easter all week. As Catholics, we really have it good. Every day is considered like Easter Sunday for 8 days (hence the Octave of Easter). So I threw out my stress and instead of doing these Monday, we did them Tuesday.
My family did not have a history of decorating eggs for Easter. Andy’s family did often when growing up, so it was very nostalgic for him. I used natural dyes to dye the eggs – they came with very mixed results. We soaked them in the colour overnight to enhance the dyes, but it only worked in some cases. This is what we used:
Red cabbage – blue
Beets and red onion skins – red
Turmeric – yellow
Spinach – green
We had some solutions left over, so we mixed them and tried to guess what they’d turn out as.
So, the nearly white ones were the green. Next year we will have to find something else to experiment with, cause this did not work. Even when we were looking at the solution we were hesitant to believe that it would do much. The blue turned out amazing. The yellow turned out amazing (the one with the cross on it and the one under the blue). The greenish-grey one to the bottom right of the picture was the purple solution…it looked neat, and that was by mixing the red and the blue mixture together. The yellow-brown ones on the top & left of the photo were the ‘orange’ – wouldn’t do that one again. And the red you can sort of see underneath and at the bottom of the pile. They turned out more browny and not so great looking. The egg itself (inside) was pink, which was neat, but the shell not so great. We think that if we had soaked them for a shorter period of time that the red might have turned out better. Next year we’ll try again! It was lots of fun experimenting to figure out which foods would give us colours! And I much prefer the natural method to colour dyes that can be found in stores, what with concerns about the chemicals in them.
Next morning we hid our Easter eggs that we decorated and Spencer had to go find our breakfast. He sure enjoyed looking for them!
And other duties now call me away. More on Easter later this week!
