Easter Egg-Dyeing Party

My niece Sophie made these delightful egg bunnies using real eggshells.

On Friday evening, we all went over to Mom’s house to dye eggs for Easter. Bun and I rode over to Mom’s together, and when we arrived, only Jake was there. The first thing he did (before even saying hello) was tag me.

“I’ve got one thing to say: You’re it,” he said. And he ran away into the backyard.

I hate to admit this, but I did not quite have the strength to chase him. (Yes, I felt sorry for him running away, screaming and laughing, with nobody after him.) Instead I set about rummaging through Mom’s pantry for gum and candy, which is what I always do at Mom’s house.

About one second later, Sophie arrived. She had been at her gymnastics lesson. She waltzed in wearing her famous metallic leopard-print leotard with cut-outs in the back.

“I’ve got to take a shower,” she announced.

“What?!” I protested. “I thought we were dyeing eggs!”

Before I knew what was happening, Sophie was in my face, teasing me. “Shut up. I stink, fool,” she said in her faux street tough way. And then she slapped me.

Then Jake came by and stepped on Matt’s foot (on purpose). Matt had just walked in, dressed in his fancy work clothes. Jake went out of his way to step on Matt’s foot, and then he ran off again without saying a word.

“Sorry about stepping on your foot there, Matt!” Matt grinned. “Oh, no problem, Jake!”

Bunny was eating Easter candy and sugar snap peas. “Well, this party is off to a weird start,” she observed, and she dissolved into giggles.

We sat out at the picnic table in the backyard to dye eggs. We had a box of crayons, and we were decorating the eggs with the crayons before we dyed them.

Bunny went through an elaborate process to decorate her first egg. Her drawing was careful and quite beautiful. Then she put her egg in the dye, and when she pulled it out, expecting it to be perfect, she cried, “Hey, wait! Who wrote ‘Bugs Bunny’ on it?!”

“Well,” Matt confessed sheepishly, “I may have come out here earlier and written on a bunch of the eggs with an invisible crayon. . . .” He held up a stupid white crayon, his secret weapon.

I loved Matt’s silly, harmless brand of mischief. I loved that “Bugs Bunny” was the best he could come up with.

Bunny couldn’t stop laughing.

Then she started working on her next egg. She was drawing a picture of her cat Jelly on it.

Kris took a look. “Oh, so she’s like Liz Taylor with huge lavender eyes?”

“Well,” Bunny said sheepishly, “her eyes are yellow, really. . . . But they’re blue in spirit!”

Jake was hard at work on an egg. When he finished, he held it up. “Hey, look what I wrote!” he cried, gleefully. “‘Screw you!’”

“Jake!” Kris yelled. “You can’t write that on an Easter egg!”

Jake dyed his “Screw you!” egg a lovely turquoise blue.

Jake is obsessed with the kids’ website Club Penguin, “a snow-covered, virtual world where children play games and interact with friends in the guise of colorful penguin avatars.” He is constantly talking about Club Penguin. He talks really fast, confusing us, telling us of his adventures there and the virtual prizes he is always winning.

I kept this in mind as I drew a picture of Jake on an Easter egg. On the front of the egg, I drew a picture of him talking (his mouth was open). And then on the back, I wrote what he was talking about. I wrote “Penguin Club!” in a speech bubble.

Then I proudly showed him my work.

Jake rolled his eyes. “You mean Club Penguin,” he said.

“Crap!” I cried. “Now how could I have gotten that wrong? I’ve only heard you say it about 10 billion times. Crap!”

But it was perfect. I am always so nerdy and out of it. Of course I wrote “Penguin Club.”

In the words of Sophie: “Well, you jacked that up, Leslie.”

Oh, I forgot to mention: Sophie has a “new personality,” developed over the last three weeks. She has become a full-time wiseacre, lifting her eyebrows in a joshing sort of way and telling jokes out of the side of her mouth. She’s extra full of sass.

Her hands were covered in egg dye, and she kept trying to get us to give her five. “Slap me some skin,” she’d say. Or: “Up top.”

Sophie spent the entire evening cracking jokes, basically doing a stand-up routine.

“So where do you get your material, Sophie?” I asked.

“Nick?” Bunny suggested.

“Sprout,” Matt said in his dry way. (Sprout is a show for babies on PBS Kids.) Sophie threw an Easter napkin at him. She was making her “angry eyebrows.”

“I make it up!” she cried. “It’s all original!”

Sophie is trying out for the part of the wolf in her school’s production of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. She did some line readings for us at supper (we had spaghetti and breadsticks and spinach salad). Sophie plays the wolf as a witty and urbane sort, a dandy who raises his eyebrows a lot and smiles slyly.

“I’m going to wear a tiny top hat to the audition,” she told us. “I know where you can get one. They have them at Claire’s.”

“Oh, and don’t forget,” Matt reminded her, “you’ll also want a little pencil mustache.”

“I am going to wear a mustache!” Sophie cried. “I already was going to! But I’m not going to use a pencil! I’m going to get a real one! They have them in gum machines! They do! They have real ones with real hair!”

“Uh, I didn’t actually mean a literal pencil,” Matt said. And we all died laughing.

I imagined Sophie trying to keep a pencil balanced on her upper lip. “Would make it kind of hard to get through your lines,” I chortled.

Matt said, “I’m just trying to imagine this mustache you’re planning to get out of a gum machine, with real hair on it. . . . I don’t know if I would put that on. . . .”

We were laughing uncontrollably.

“Fools!” Sophie said.

She was wearing a gigantic tie-dyed T-shirt.

After supper we had an egg hunt. Mom’s yard has lots of great spots for hiding eggs: fallen logs, rotting stumps, tree holes, hanging pots of orchids, amaryllis patches, confederate jasmine clumps, mole holes, old bird nests, woods. . . . There were 30 eggs to hide—and the eggs were full of small presents. There were also a few big presents, and we hid them just like eggs. We hid the pink tissue-paper-wrapped boxes under the big sago palms and in the shady loquat orchard. It was getting dark, and the yard was lush with shadows.

Jake and Sophie are terrible at finding eggs. They give up far too easily, and they immediately beg us for hints and clues. Jake is especially terrible. “Am I at least getting hot? Am I getting hot at all?” he’ll whine. He usually just follows Sophie. He follows right in her footsteps, so she finds all the eggs and he gets nothing. Then he pouts.

“Stop following Sophie!” I was yelling. “Go your own way!”

Generous Sophie gave Jake an egg she found.

“Was that one of the boy eggs?” I asked. (Some of the eggs contained boy presents and were marked with Jake’s initial. The girl presents were marked with an “S” for Sophie.)

“No,” Sophie said brightly. “I just gave it to him just to be nice.”

“Well, that’s a great eggs-ample for your brother,” Matt said, and then he looked very proud in a shy sort of way. He loves a terrible pun.

“Matt!” Bunny cried.

But it wouldn’t have been an egg-dyeing party without at least one really dumb pun from Matt.

The plastic eggs contained some wonderful presents: candy rings, Crabby Patties, egg-shaped bubblegum, Jelly Bellies, Hello Kitty socks (for Sophie), night-vision goggles (for Jake), Lego kits, and Liv doll stuff (that was for Sophie too). Mom makes the Giving Tree look selfish, you know.