Easter Prep 2014

Last night I arrived home from work to little Rowan throwing up everything he tried to drink. He was dying of thirst and really wanted to chug entire cups of Pedialyte, but then promptly would throw it back up. He finally gave it up, half cuddling me, just in his diaper (clothes privileges had been lost hours early) while I watched the season finally of Scandal. Which, as a side note, was completely asinine, as I had expected, but entertaining.

It was one of those nights where we laid down to sleep bracing for the worst. The worst being Q2hr vomiting from the baby followed by big brother waking up throwing up as well, with the added possibility that all four of us could be praying to the porcelain God's by morning. However, the best case scenario prevailed here, and there was much rejoicing!! Ro got up a few times and we gave him small drinks of pedialyte and then he requested to go back to bed. What a good little sick boy. This morning he seemed a little less energetic but brought me a thing of mandarin oranges for breakfast, which he kept down great! He did spend most of the afternoon taking an epic nap, the likes of which his Grandpa Blakley would have been terribly proud of. At the four and a half hour point I woke him up because it was two thirty and I wanted some hope of him sleeping tonight.

While Ro slept Zane and I had lots of Easter fun. We dyed Easter Eggs, after much conversation about what the word dye meant, verses die?? This is very confusing and I couldn't figure out how to explain that to a three year old, so the verbiage was quickly changed to "coloring eggs" so as to avoid any confusion about death being involved in our Easter fun. I was amazed and impressed by his patience, his attention span, and how very careful he was with all our different tasks. We did all the activities that come in the PAAS dying kit. We did the wrappers that suck onto your egg in boiling water, which Zane found to be a fascinating 'smearment.' Really all of our egg coloring was a great experiment. We left eggs in all the colors while we put the wrappers on, so that some of the eggs would actually get to beautiful dark color. We put stickers on some after they dried, we colored on them with crayons, making purple minions, monsters, and writing our 'letters' (aka names). I couldn't believe that at the point he had finally lost interest (which was probably a solid 45 minutes later) we had just run out of eggs to dye. What are the odds??

Zane called his dipper a bat for some reason and could not have his mind changed that it wasn't really a bat. He also enjoyed pretending to have a monocle, which was highly entertaining. At least this year he put the eggs in with the dipper, but taking them out still pretty much involved putting his whole hand in the cup.

 Pure excitement, ever so gently, putting his first egg in a cup.

 Zane even got to put his eggs in the boiling water and watch the wrapper suck onto it. He loved it!

 Carefully drawing a purple minion egg.

 The tongs could get them out of the water sometimes, but he had to rearrange them all on the drying wrack so he still ended up with very colorful hands.

 Here are our beautiful results!

After this I was prepared to sit and rest, but Zane and his crazy good memory, reminded me that we still needed to make bunny rolls and bread. We had ever so briefly discussed this in the morning and I had fully banked on him not remembering about it, but did buy some yeast just in case. Let me start by saying I am terrible at making bread, it stresses me out, and usually doesn't go well. But I was ready to give it the old college go in the Easter spirit. Zane was very excited that we were finally going to get to use the 'caption hook' thing on the Kitchen Aid mixer, and we were going to use the spill guard, which was a whole knew, cool attachment he had never even seen before (again, I never make bread). The cooking part went well and as I was kneeding it I turned around to find my little Zane, diligently cleaning, with Clorox wipes, the mixer and counter. "It not shiny yet mamma, we not done." In the midst of his kindness and trying to be helper, he spilled one of our two long term experimental eggs, that had been set aside to see how dark they would get if we left them in their cups all the way through naps. This means that my counter top is now tan with a bit of pink hue to it. It will get better, right???

Ready for action, waiting for the milk to cool. He was taking his bread making very serious, spatula at the ready in case of an emergency.

 Tasting time!!! He loved the Captain Hook attachment.

 And here is a child after my own heart. He got everything nice and shiny. Notice in the background the pink egg dye spilled all over the counter and the pink egg clearly out of it's cup. Oops!

Sadly the bread making fell apart at the very last step, right about the point where I stopped reading mom's detailed instructions, but to fair the instructions to the final step were not included in my handout. I took out our bunny rolls, which look more like fat rats because I made them too big, but it's ok. Then I took the bread out, when it was ever so slightly browned. I, being apparently an idiot, try to it turn it over onto a cooling wrack, and it fell in on itself, rendering it terribly ugly and obviously under cooked. Yet another bread failure on my part. The rolls I think will at least taste good if they do look like field mice with multiple stab wounds. Zane went a little crazy "adding eyes" all over their fat little bodies. Good times!! I don't really want to put a picture of this failure on the world wide web, but here goes.

 Note to self, smaller balls for our rolls next time.

In the afternoon there was a small Easter Basket debacle. The debacle being that Zane is a liar and told his teacher that the blue camouflage basket was his, so she wrote his name on it and he took it home. Turns out it was some other poor little boy was devastated today at the thought of not having an Easter basket for Easter. So we had to take it back and have a conversation about the difference between wanting things and them actually being yours. Apparently the note about the Easter Egg hunt specifically said not to bring home baskets, per Zach, so Zane hadn't brought one. Who knows, but I feel bad that he borderline stole an Easter basket.

As for the rest of our Easter celebrations Zane and I have gone over the plan for tomorrow roughly eighty times today, but he still can't seem to grasp it. We are going to a big Easter Egg Hunt at the Myriad Gardens THEN going to Grandma's to fly kites. He is very confused, but I'm hoping we will all have a great time hunting eggs in the morning, with his very own Ninja Turtle Easter basket. I'm holding my breath that Zane doesn't start vomiting tonight and sending prayers over to the Richard's kiddos who apparently might be battling a stomach bug as well. It would really be tons of fun if the whole Blakley crew could make it up to the farm for Easter. Here's hoping!!

P.S. I'd like to wish my sister in law Trina a very Happy Birthday today!! Hope you had a wonderful day!!