Easter Eggs: Tiny Works of Heart
by Kandi Traxel
Country Moms Online Family of Sites:  http://www.countrymoms.com


I never could understand why people would pay so much money for those expensive egg decorating kits when most people have all the tools they need lying around the house! And, oh, the fun that can be created when you allow your kids to use their imaginations!

When my kids were small there were so many things that I enjoyed doing with them! One of those was dressing them up and going trick-or-treating, and another of my favorites was decorating Easter Eggs.

Frugal to the core, I scoured my cabinets, pulling out the food coloring, vinegar, and enough small bowls, cups and containers to hold all the various colors that I knew my little ones would want to experiment with!

Then I would gather up all the broken crayons, various brands of markers, and all the hundreds of stickers that had been given to them throughout the year. One year we even incorporated some Glitter Glue, that was left over from some school project that we just HAD to have them for!

After we gathered everything up and deposited it all on the kitchen table, hot water, a little vinegar and several different colors were added to all of those mismatched bowls and containers.

Then the fun would begin.

My daughters would do their best to see who could come up with the prettiest or most unusual colors, or to see who could layer the most colors on top of each other to get the strangest looking hues! Writing little messages on them and THEN dipping in the colors was always so much fun, because wherever the crayon wax was, the color wouldn't stick leaving a white border around every word or little drawing.

Some of them ended up with crayon scribbles, left undipped, some were decorated with stickers only, but each and everyone of them were unique, a work of art that any egg decorating 3-year-old would be proud of.

When all of the eggs had been crayoned, markered, stickered and dipped, they were placed back into the carton to await the hiding and hunting.

I guess you could say that none of our eggs would ever be worthy of a pictorial spread in "Martha Stewart Living", but we loved them and were very proud of each and every one. The girls never could wait to show them off!

When I sit and think about all the things that I'll miss as my kids get older, egg coloring is at the top of the list. Watching as my children created their works of art, and getting a litte insight into what they were thinking, is a treasure that you can't hide in a clump of grass, put in a basket, or discard when the day is over. It is one of those rare ones that you get to keep forever.

Kandi Traxel is the owner of Country Moms Online Family of Websites
 http://www.countrymoms.com



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