night dying

another easter tradition is dying eggs with our friends. in an attempt to channel our inner martha, we read up on and watched all the tutorials she gave for this year's eggs. armed with a cricut and several martha punches and some vinyl, we thought we were ready. while the guys grilled and the kids played, we punched and cut and prepared for the event. once everyone was fed, we finally began. by now, it was almost dark, but anyone with kids knows some activities are best done outside so we pushed through.

we had almost three dozen.

we had each vinyled up 10 or so and each participating child had 4.

each child immediately dropped their eggs in a dye cup. they took about 2.5 seconds to finish dying all their eggs.

then, they were more than willing to help the mommies with their eggs.

meanwhile, this little guy was trying to climb into the koi pond. luckily, our husbands wrangled the youngest two or this little guy would have been swimming with the fishes, literally. spencer sat in her high chair nibbling away at dinner quiet as a mouse. it got so dark, we had to get a flash light to see what color we were dying our eggs. when we flashed it on spencer to see what she was doing, she was covered in mosquitos. that's when we headed in.

where did we go wrong or why don't our eggs look like martha's:

*instead of a beautiful studio full of all the things you may or may not need to dye eggs, we were scrambling to get everything outside and within our range of use.

*instead of incredibly gifted artisans with degrees from top notch art schools as assistants, we had 5 incredibly cute helpers who all attend preschool, though some of them are quite crafty themselves.

*instead of preparing for this project months ago using regular working days to practice and perfect the ideas before publishing them, we texted about our plan briefly 24 hours before putting it to use and began preparation less than an hour before the sun went down.

martha, we got nothin' on you because these two girls will never be that prepared. we just don't function like that. we are last-minute, up-til-the-wee-hours, pull-it-off kinda girls.

and, well, that works for us.

sometimes.