The Great Egg Debate

This was the first year that I hid plastic eggs. Traditionally, I would do what my mother did and hide the hard-boiled eggs that we had colored. Well, it seems that I should be locked up... because I could have given my children salmonella. Who knew?

I recently read in a parenting magazine-you know the kind-the ones that don't really HELP you through this maze of parenting but rather make you feel like a complete and utter failure by the time you get to the "work at home" ads in the back. I am obviously not sterilizing enough, making crafts enough, reading the best children's books enough and having enough sex with my husband after childbirth... but they will tell me how to lose that extra 5 pounds (as if 5 lbs. would make a dent!) and they will tell me how to spice up date night at home with just some tissue paper and a push up bra! The editors of these magazines should be fired-these magazines have become as bad as Cosmo is for a single woman... they just stress me out.

Anyway, I was reading about egg-etiquette and it said that hard boiled eggs should not be left out any longer than 2 hours... even if you are having a party and you see that the eggs have been on the buffet table for 2 hours, you should quickly remove them from the buffet and put them in a fridge (or swap them out with the "extra" eggs you have prepared in the fridge already--that just cracks me up... extra eggs prepared! HAHAHAHA!)

I called my mother and asked her what she thought. I have to say that I am amazed that my sisters and I survived the living conditions that we were subjected to on Easter morning. Every Holy Saturday evening, we would color eggs. We would color what seemed to be a ton of eggs. We would color them with toxic crayons first-not the one "invisible" crayon that came with the dye, but the toxic $.99 for a box of 500 crayons. My mom would then let them set on the counter to dry-never putting them in the fridge for fear of the color running when she would take them out to hide. I am sure an etiquette book somewhere states that little dots of Easter egg dye on the living room carpet is not appropriate... it said nothing about poisoning your children back then. After we would go to bed, my mom would then take the warm, hard boiled, toxic eggs and hide them around the house. We would all sleep through the night and wake to find the killer eggs and we would even enjoy one or two before we started putting on our Easter outfits for Church. The eggs STILL did not make it into the fridge, because my mom would then make either egg salad, or deviled eggs (maybe the name deviled eggs is appropriate, I mean, if the eggs are laden with deadly bacteria I am willing to bet the devil had something to do with it.) We would then take the eggs that we had colored for the Priest to Church, putting him in grave danger as well, and then continue to dine on the warm eggs for a week. I must have internal organs of steel I tell you to survive such an obvious attempt on my mother's part to poison us all.

The above had been my Easter tradition as well until I read that stupid magazine. Our beautiful colored eggs have been safely tucked away in the fridge for no one to oohhh and ahhh over and the 48 plastic eggs that were stuffed with jelly beans, whoppers, and sweet tarts are all but empty now and piled in a basket on the counter. My children all went to bed with upset stomachs because of all of the sugar they inhaled yesterday and I was wide awake watching a CSI marathon for hours last night because I was so doped up on sugar. Next year I am going back to the warm salmonella eggs. I think the health and well-being of my children insists upon it!