"Our minds must be conflicting because you say plague of snakes and all I hear is Easter bunny, Easter bunny, Easter bunny." -Meatwad, AquaTeen

The New Boy can't find the letter 'E', so we figured he couldn't find many Easter eggs, either. I hope he doesn't remember this when he chooses my nursing home.

Easter is a time of renewal. A time when the tyranny of winter gives way to dainty, pointy-toed-shoe-wearing summer.

Not there yet, since it was 10ºF this morning.

Last night we boiled, painted and dyed the Easter eggs. The New Boy isn’t quite a year old, so we let him sleep and drool to his heart’s content as The Boy colored the eggs.

I was in the store, and I bought the PAAS Easter egg kit. That’s what I normally do. The problem was me. I purchased the “Deluxe” Easter egg coloring set with enough different components to finish construction of the International Space Station, rather than the normal “six colors and a copper Easter egg dipping thingy.” My mistake. You could make mosaic eggs, foil wrapped eggs, banded eggs, plastic shrink-wrapped eggs, eggs with messages on them, copper-painted eggs, and, oh, yeah, (what I was looking for the first place) colored eggs. With this kit, I’m surprised you couldn’t make “Easter Island” eggs.

As The Mrs. and The Boy colored all (12) of the boiled eggs (two were broken, both my fault, so I boiled two more) I remembered that the only one in the house who liked boiled eggs was The Mrs. She’d be feeling eggy all week long.

The smell and sound of the vinegar mixing with the fizzy tablets brings me back to being six every time I dunk one. If you’re wondering, after a bazillion years, the yellow color still sucks. Perhaps my favorite part was pouring the dye down the drain, watching the colors mix as they headed to make our septic tank colorful, yet still unseen.

As a little kid, nobody ever tried to convince me that a large rabbit would hide eggs that I had colored so inexpertly, so I could look for them. I knew that Mom and Dad were behind the whole operation. They took me to church, but, I fooled them. I colored Jesus a nice bright purple. When the Sunday School teacher told me that Jesus wasn’t purple, I asked her, “Was Jesus God?”

“Yes,” replied the Sunday School teacher, unaware of the trap that had been laid for her.

“Then he could have been purple if he wanted to be,” I said as I started to color Judas a nice bright green. Jesus could have made Judas green, right?

I believe I’m one of the few children to have been kicked out of Sunday School for my coloring (this story is essentially true, even the kicked-out of Sunday School at age five part).

This year (like last) we hid the eggs inside the house. Setting them outside on the snow would be bad for three reasons:

• Brightly colored eggs would be easy to find in the white snow
• Dogs like eggs, too, and,
• I have no bunny-shaped shoes to leave convincing bunny-shaped footprints.

Where I grew up wasn’t Alaska, but I recall more than one Easter where we had to look for eggs inside, due to the snow. We replicated that experience today. While The Mrs. kept The Boy busy answering calculus questions in the bedroom (I could hear the dulcet tones of The Mrs. castigating The Boy for not being able to take a partial differential of three variable function, “Don’t you understand, dx/dy, not dx/dz!”) I hid the eggs.

I decided to go as far away I could from being sneaky. Finding an egg next week would be bad. Finding an egg next month would be socially unacceptable, since something about rotten egg smell doesn’t say, “the casserole is probably okay to eat,” to the company. Besides, after he found the eggs, I could curl up on the couch and catch a nap.

The Boy found the eggs quickly, and found them all. The Mrs. headed back to bed, having dealt with The New Boy multiple times during the night. We’d feel guilty about not going to church, but, we don’t so much. The Boy and I talked a good bit about Jesus, and the reason that we were celebrating Easter. It made about as much sense to him, I’m sure, as a Kubrick movie. I think he has the basics down. Except that he seems to think Jesus was a bright orange . . . and I’m not going to argue. His logic is good.