Oster Spektakle

Silas spoke his first German word. I was expecting it to be pretzel because he loves those salty, doughy things. Loves them enough that you can thwart an emerging tantrum by asking if he would like to go to the bakery and get a pretzel.
But no, his first German word was spoken after he insisted on going outside for a stroll through the back garden first thing in the morning. One of Rachel's neighbors had come outside and Silas was waving frantically at him. Sometimes he just gets in a mood where he has to kiss everyone, hug everyone, or wave to everyone (sounds sweet, but those moods can extend to kicking everyone too). So the man says "Guten morgen" to us, and I reply, and prompt Silas to reply. Which he does with a tiny little "morga." He kept repeating it as we walked back to the house and and my sister's downstairs neighbor brought out a hard boiled Easter egg for him. Two orange swirled eggs, one for each baby. She doesn't speak any English, and she is always giving Silas things to eat when we visit. Both babies really liked the eggs until Silas started throwing his across the room. Later we would discover Ellis's egg squashed into his car seat.

Rachel and I had our own egg dying spectacular a couple days ago too. There is an array of kits for coloring eggs at the grocery store. We spent way too much time deciding which ones would be the best , and finally settled on "Eins, Zwei, Glitter-Ei!" and "Shake It!"
Rachel went downstairs to buy eggs from her neighbor. The woman seemed to be scrutinizing the eggs for some reason although we could not discern why since many of the eggs were cracked, all were covered in chicken poop, and she's almost totally blind. I spent far too long drilling the eggs with a needle and almost gave myself an aneurysm blowing the egg out of the shell (Luckily I had been practicing on those stupid long skinny balloons used to make animals).
We began with the glitter egg kit while the we had a few precious moments of simultaneous baby nap. As you can see from the picture of Rachel, those precious moments were largely wasted. The kit was nice in that there were no messy cups of dye, just tubes that could be squeezed into the palm of your plastic gloved hands and smeared around onto the egg. And the dye itself was a nice iridescent metallic. The dye is supposed to be a bit sticky and then you wrap the egg in foil and rub so pieces of thin metal are transferred to the egg. This largely did not happen. Of course we tried more dye, less dye, pressing harder on the foil, every permutation we could and never got very far with it.
By this time we were getting a bit frustrated and the babies were awake. So we swapped to the other kit which was more kid friendly. This one had small containers which you filled with "special rice" then applied drops of dye to the rice . The dyed rice gave the eggs a nice speckled look which was especially nice when done in two colors. Silas and Ellis had a great time shaking the rice around and the mess was kept to a minimum. We ended up with a dozen nicely colored eggs which Silas loves to show to his father and grandmother on the web cam.

Yesterday I took the babies up into the forest to search for a suitable branch to create a tree for the eggs. There are two candidates on the porch waiting for today's mission: figure out how to stand the tree vertically and hang the eggs.