This morning I dyed Easter eggs with the kids and it was a great success.  Gregory opted for the toddler full body approach to egg dyeing and his hands are now a lovely purplish-red color.  (I’ve relaxed so much as a mother…  there’s no way I would have let Emma dye eggs this way!)  We’ve washed and washed and I think that they are about as good as they are going to get for now.  He was a little unhappy about it at first and kept showing me his hands and asking to wash them again (our boy does have a touch of fastidiousness about him sometimes) but I distracted him with lunch and now he seems to be ok now.  His eggs turned out remarkably well given the various dunkings they received in all the different dye colors.  I wouldn’t have thought it would be a terribly effective way to dye eggs, but they ended up looking quite nice - not the muddled brown color that I expected.  Emma’s as all quite lovely as well - she of course carefully used the egg dipper and the spoon to dye her eggs various lovely colors.  I wonder, is it ever possible to hard boil enough eggs for dyeing?

I was able to go to the Holy Thursday Mass by myself, which was quite lovely.  (both the service and going by myself *grin*)  The priest gave an excellent homily that I’m still thinking about, and the whole service was quite nice and reverently done.   It was interesting at the end in particular, because this church is so small that there was no other place to take the consecrated host to so they just set up a small side table about five feet way from the tabernacle.  Not exactly ideal, but it was still handled quite well.  (I know, this makes no sense to non-Catholics, sorry)  It was so nice to be at Mass and be able to focus entirely on the Mass.  Oh, I’m sure my mind wandered at times - I’m by no means perfect of course - but my  level of prayerful participation was far greater than it usually is without two little ones to keep an eye on!  I would really like to try to go to Mass on a weekday by myself sometimes.  Matt and I have talked about it and we’ve agreed to it in theory, we just haven’t quite worked out the details yet.  I also read an extremely interesting piece in Journey to Easter about Holy Thursday that I’m trying to wrap my mind around.  I find Pope Benedict’s writing to be extremely clear, but also extremely hard to summarize in my head and get ahold of.  As I read it, I think - wow, that’s so amazing and profound! - and then later I try to put it into my own words to better assimilate it and I have virtually no success.

I also took the kids to the Good Friday service yesterday, which had mixed results.  Gregory was not pleased to be there, although I think it made a real impression on Emma.  I spent the entire service trying to hush Gregory and keep him from being too wiggly, which made it hard to think at all about the service.  The comments from the people behind us didn’t exactly help.  *sigh*  The lady next to us made a point of saying how good the kids were though, and to not listen if anyone says otherwise, which I thought was very nice and made me feel much better.  I had a moment of delusion and decided to try and stay for the Stations of the Cross after the service, but bailed after the second station.  I really should have known better - especially since we went outside for a bit between the service and stations.  Gregory was about ready to mutiny when I said we were going back inside after he was allowed to run around in the grass for ten minutes!

I was hoping to go to the Easter Vigil service this evening, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it.  I had this bright idea to make little Easter bags for the kids since their baskets are somewhere in storage…  but of course I haven’t done anything more than wash the fabric.  Also, I am really very tired and my body is acting up on me quite a bit.  I’m not sleeping well because of the soreness in my back and hips and that is making me very stiff and tired.  The baby seems to be in a diagonal position right now (and has been for several weeks) so I have a lot of pushing against my left pelvis and right ribcage.  I’m also having sporadic Braxton-Hicks contractions that are far stronger than they were in my last pregnancy.  I’ve heard from others that these get stronger with each pregnancy (oh joys) and so far that’s been my experience.   (I hope that isn’t always the case for your sake, Emily!)  In a way I’m glad of them though, because they are giving me plenty of opportunity to remember all those little tricks for getting through contractions - don’t clench your teeth, remember to breathe, relax your body, etc.  I’m already doing all those things much better now, and almost automatically at times, so that’s very helpful.

So that’s a little picture of life right now.  I think I’ve rested long enough (it was nice of Matt to leave his laptop here so that I could rest in bed and type at the same time, don’t you think?) and now it is time to get the kids together so that we can go over to the house.  I’m going to try and see if I can do a little work either on the house or the garden (we planted strawberries last week and they need better critter protection, so I may try to work on that) before I collapse, and the kids will get a nice opportunity to run around and enjoy the sunshine.