Dye raw eggs for Easter

Here's how Daphne avoids the inevitable hard-boiled egg inundation that comes with Easter egg decoration:

Every year for Easter, my five-year-old boys are wildly excited about decorating eggs. There is a week of anticipation, thirty minutes of setup, and five minutes of furious dunking. By the time they have plopped the eggs back into the carton to dry, however, they've completely lost interest in their creations. Then I'm stuck with four dozen puce-colored hard boiled eggs. This year, my sister and I accidentally mixed up our cartons of cooked and raw eggs. It was a disaster--until we realized that we could just put the decorated raw eggs back into the refrigerator to be used as usual. (My boys also love to cook, so it's even more fun to crack open a few puce eggs to make muffins!) This is one mistake we're planning on repeating next year, too!

(BTW: It may sound scary to use raw eggs because they might crack and make a mess, but I've found that innocently dropped eggs rarely shatter. They just crack like their hard-boiled friends and stay intact until you open them into a container to be used later. Eggs that are "dropped" on purpose, of course, are another story!)

At my daughter's preschool, they paint eggs using cotton swabs and watercolor paint. The process is delicate and the results are beautiful.

Related: Best of Parent Hacks: Easter fun

Comments

[Neal]

Hm, I don't know. Not to get all overprotective, but I believe raw egg shells can harbor harmful bacteria in their tiny pores. Probably not a huge deal, as dipping them in the vinegar dye will likely sterilize. Fine then, go crazy!