Easter egg festivities and hail

As Equinox has come and gone, spring is teasing us. She invites robins onto our lawn (I counted 45 pecking on the grass this morning), but she also asks snow to join the party. As sun breaks through, snow gently falls. Not enough to stick, mind you, but enough to remind us that winter still hasn't said Goodbye. In fact, as I am writing this blog entry right now, hail started pelting down, and everything is covered with tiny ice balls!
It went from this, with just a few hail balls...

to this, with the whole ground covered, in less than ten minutes...

Hail is starting to fall.

Eva has never seen this stuff.

What better day than to prepare for Easter? We were in full Easter egg mode today: blowing out and decorating eggs, boiling and coloring eggs with natural dyes, and making signs that say “Happy Easter!”.

The blowing-out-eggs part was very entertaining to watch. Steve, ever the handyman, used his drill to scramble the inside of the egg, which was supposed to help the egg white and yolk to exit easier. Then, he charged the boys with blowing out the liquid stuff with a syringe. After watching that for a while, I suggested to just prick a hole in the shell, and then to blow it out the old fashioned way, like my mother used to do. It worked marvelously, and the boys were really into it!

First, make a holes in the egg, one on top, one on bottom.

Then watch the pro use his power tools.  The offspring looks very skeptical.

Then the offspring copies Dad.

Now comes the syringe part.

This is truly a family affair.  It's complicated business, this.  Notice Eva is wearing a ballet dress for the occasion.

Heck, let's do away with the power tools!  Lungs are old fashioned power tools!

While we waited for the now empty eggs to dry in front of the wood stove, Kai whipped up some Challa bread, all by himself. It's a great bread for spreading butter and honey or home made jam on it, and the dough uses lots of excess duck eggs. Here is a picture that represents our day: dough rising in front of the wood stove, while the blown out egg shells are drying, in the midst of newly planted seeds waiting to germinate. And do you notice all the lovely dust under the wood stove?

While the bread is rising, we decorate the blown out eggs, who had a chance to dry by now.  Even Eva gets to paint her own!

Why not hang our beautiful easter eggs from the kitchen lamp, so we can look at them at every meal?

Earlier in the day, the kids were inspired by all the robins.  So they got out our bird reference books and started drawing pictures of birds that visit us often.