Pull up a chair

Do you have a cup of coffee or tea in hand? Good. Now we can sit down together and enjoy the morning! It is a lovely morning, with the blue sky and all the pretty shades of green right outside my window. There is also a robin in my yard searching for bits of stuff and string to make her nest with, along with a little brown rabbit who the kids desperately want to catch and make into their very own pet.

I hope your Easter was as joyous as ours. Lent was so long this year. Easter morning dawned with cinnamon rolls on our plates and the delighted squeals of children finding their baskets and the eggs they colored. Anna had a plan to stay up and see the Easter Bunny but then thought better of it when she remembered that Santa doesn't come until all little children are asleep. Fearing Mr. Bunny might have the same policy in place, she went right to bed.

On Good Friday, I decided that we had to color our eggs with natural dyes. I had been itching to try this for many years now, but never had. This was the year. So with a list of ingredients in hand, I went to the store. I don't even like beets, but into the cart they went. A purple cabbage (we are having slaw with our black bean burgers this week with the unused portion) and some yellow and red onions went in the cart too. I bet the stock boy thought I was nuts digging under all the onions to load up my produce bag with all the discarded skins! I already had turmeric in the spice cabinet and I always have a large jug of vinegar so I headed home with this idyllic picture in my head of the kids and I blissfully cooking and coloring our eggs the all natural way. That picture faded fast. This is messy work folks! With five different colors we wanted to make and only four burners on my stove, I already could tell this would take longer than I thought. We ended up in the kitchen all afternoon. My kids also need to get a better understanding of the word "gentle" when stirring the eggs in the dye. 

  How can a vegetable so beautiful taste like dirt? I so want to like beets.

 The kids oohed and aahed when I sliced the cabbage in half.

 Here are all those onion skins I went digging for at the grocery store.

 The ones on the left are dyed with beets, the orange ones are the yellow onion skins.

 The yellow is the turmeric.

The browish green came from red onion skins.

Tony said I should just have used our brown eggs.

The blue is from the cabbage.

 How sad is it that my kids are wearing their Christmas pajamas on Easter morning?

 "Can we eat the jellybeans before the cinnamon rolls?"

 It's a dinosaur head shaped plastic egg. He loved it.

 What the floor looked like.

 After returning from Mass, I had lots of work to do. We invited two families from our homeschool group to join us for Easter dinner. Everyone brought something which made it so much easier but I still had to figure out how to seat 16 people in our house and if we had enough dishes to serve 16 people. We did, excepting the cups, so I bought some plastic ones. I cooked side dishes and bread to make sure there was dairy-free food for us weirdos. I wanted to make a dairy-free dessert but was coming up empty. I went to check my e-mail because isn't that what everyone does when they can't figure out a solution to their problems. There, in my inbox, was the answer. Groupon had an offer from a bakery called "My Vegan Sweet Tooth". I bought the groupon and ordered 2 dozen cookies and a cherry crumble pie. Oh, and those sweet rolls we enjoyed for breakfast too!

The older kids hid eggs for the littler ones out back.

 Look how excited she was to show me what she found!

The bigger kids need to remember that they are slightly taller than the littles.

That did not stop them from retreiving the egg!

It is always wonderful to have a special day like Sunday, but it is equally as wonderful to have a routine to return to the next day. I liked having the rhythm of Monday laundry and grocery shopping and schoolwork to remind me of my vocation that I have chosen. Which is what I need to return to now. Have a lovely day.