They're about $6 per dozen right now. We boiled 25 eggs for Easter this year, so it cost us about $12 for an afternoon of family fun—and that included dinner! Not too bad.
Do I wish eggs were cheaper? Certainly.
But I also think there are bigger fish frying here and that in spite of—*waves hands vaguely*—all this it's good to be together, it's good to enjoy each other. I got to read some of Delores Williams' Sisters in the Wilderness over the Easter weekend and particularly enjoyed this passage: "the text [scriptures] suggest that the spirit of God in Jesus came to show humans life—to show redemption through a perfect ministerial vision of righting relations between body (individual and community), mind (of humans and of tradition) and spirit" (p. 146).
Righting relations. What a beautiful summary of everything the Saviour asks us to do—to love others, to mourn with those that mourn, to find what was lost, to just...go about doing good...to make things right. That's it. That's the message.
I'm not sure where to go between this point and the next, so before I tell you the first (and perhaps only) miracle of our 2025 Easter Egg Smackdown, I'll tell you that this week was Easter Sunday, so we only had one hour of church. Last week was our ward conference (and the week before that was General Conference), and two weeks before that was the week Benjamin spoke in church.
Anyway, a major highlight of his day last week—during ward conference—was that the bishop quoted him in the middle of his talk. Bishop Dallin said, "As Benjamin Heiss advised us all a few weeks ago—do what you can do!"
That also happened to be the message of Andrew's underwear talk during FHE this evening.
But I digress...so now I suppose I can tell you the miracle of the 2025 Easter Egg Smackdown: not a single egg was cracked during the egg dying process. No one dropped one or accidentally put all their weight on one or knocked one off the table or anything. We usually lose quite a few in the process of dying...but I guess the kids are growing up or something and now they all (mostly) know how to treat eggs with care (that is, we are no longer quite as outnumbered by chaos-makers as we once were).
Everyone got three eggs to decorate (with one egg designated the emergency back up egg...which we didn't even need).
We forgot to pick up any dye at the store so we had to make our own using food colouring and vinegar and boiling water...which is almost the same process as dropping the tablets into the cups of water, so not all that taxing...but listen!
About ten years ago Andrew went to the store—in Durham—and egg dying kits were on sale after Easter for super cheap. They were like 10 cents each...or something ridiculous...so Andrew grabbed a bunch of them...and we have been living off that deal for the past ten years. We've dragged them across the country with us twice. We haven't had to think about preparing for Easter in so long that we didn't even realize we had to.
And then it didn't help that I've been busy with my end of semester and Andrew was out of town the couple of weeks leading up to Easter and...yeah...we forgot to get dye.
So if you see a good deal...let us know so we can stock up!
The food colouring worked just as well as anything, honestly.
Here's Phoebe taking a pepper break:
These mini peppers are her "favourite treat" right now. She munches on them all the time and begs for them at the store.
Here are my eggs before I dyed them—Egg-scalibur, Resurregg-tion, and Eggsodus:
Oh, and the girls had a friend come over so she could go to a youth activity with them in the afternoon (Saturday), so we made her an egg as well. Behold M-egg-kenna:
And here's McKenna taking a picture of M-egg-kenna:
She thought it was hilarious. And she possibly also enjoyed the Easter Egg Smackdown as well (though she also thought it was pretty weird).
Here's Alexander showing off his mosquito egg:
And here are all the eggs more or less together:
We had a cockroach, Minerva McGon-egg-all, Lady Egg-beth, Murder on the Orient Eggspress, Silly Person... Here's Alexander with Silly Person:
Phoebe named her eggs Hoppy, Puppy, and then she wanted Puppy again, but we convinced her to go with Clifford (the b-egg red dog) because that "puppy" egg was red. With all of our eggs decorated and named, we made up a bracket.
Without consulting each other, Andrew and I printed out a 25-place bracket from the very same website at the very same time. So that was a pretty funny surprise at the printer. We went with my sheet, though, because I changed the name at the top to reflect our event, while Andrew went with the default name.
Rachel put the contender names on the bracket and did a really good job of it, too! Ordinarily we run into a player having to play against themselves...but that did not happen a single time this year.
Everyone more or less kept their emotions in check as well—perhaps because we had company, perhaps (again) because we're all getting older and more practiced about balancing such complexities. Either way, it was a fun afternoon. Here are some pictures of the fun:
Benjamin was determined to win again this year (he's been the reigning champion three years in a row), so he was a little crushed (haha) when his egg Rotta (?) was disqualified on the first round.
Phoebe was just glad to be alive. Whenever she won a round she'd cheer something like, "Wahoo! I played and I didn't die!" and when she lost she'd cheer something like, "At least we can still eat it!"
Miriam was (accidentally) cosplaying as Sophie Sheridan (from Momma Mia the musical):
Here you can see that Phoebe technically lost...and that everyone around her cares about it more than she does. We were like, "Don't teach her to be sad about it! She's fine!"
This was, perhaps, our most violent round—Rachel's McGon-egg-all versus Andrew's Sunset. A panel of judges determined that McGon-egg-all would carry on to the next round.
These two were so cute going against each other. They had to roll the eggs, like, fifty times before they finally made contact. We were like, "Get closer...get closer...get closer..."
Here's Miriam anxiously checking her egg for damage and learning that she'd beaten Andrew's egg:
Here's Rachel (top) and McKenna (bottom) squaring off against each other:
And here's Phoebe getting some assistance from Daddy (because sometimes she forgot what the purpose of the activity was):
"Who cares what we're doing?" she seemed to exude through her energy. "We're having fun!"
This is the point where we determined that poor McGon-egg-all, who had been through so much, was a goner:
And suddenly we were at the final round! I didn't realize it when I snapped this cute picture of Miriam...
But when I realized it, I pulled in Alexander as well. Our final contenders were Miriam with Tutti and Alexander with Jupiter:
And here they are after, both looking about as equally excited as the other...so unless you noticed the big crater in Miriam's egg...you wouldn't know that she had lost!
There's also this video evidence, I suppose showing Miriam's brief moment of despair followed by a quick recovery that we would not have seen five or six years ago. Isn't it wonderful that kids grow up? Wonderful...and...sad at the same time.
Alexander's emotions are a bit more on his sleeve in this video on than they appeared in his victory pictures (and that's okay):
That's right—Alexander is our 2025 winner!
Here's the full bracket (with Jupiter sitting on the winner's slot):
And here's Phoebe mashing all that egg up into egg salad (which for her was just as fun as anything else that afternoon):
Zoë was pretty upset to have lost again. She's never won, poor kid. But I'm sure one day she'll get lucky. As Effie Trinket would say, "May the eggs be ever in your favour!"
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