Easter has nothing to do with eggs.  Or bunnies.  And we need to start remembering this, because Easter eggs are a dangerous business.  Besides teaching our children that the Cadbury bunny lays creme filled chocolate eggs, they encourage preschool teachers to do lots of art projects involving eggs.

Which is fine, until they involve actual eggs.

Wednesday

I was instructed to send several hard boiled eggs to school with Anne on Wednesday because her class was going to dye them before they had their Easter egg hunt.

Naturally I forgot about the eggs until 8:00 that morning.

So I tried to boil them, quickly.  Which, as anyone who has ever boiled eggs knows, is a BAD idea.  Eggs don’t like high heat.  (And yes, Mom, I did use cold water.  I just turned the gas burner on high.)

Ahem.

Anyway, one egg cracked and spilled its white guts into the water about a minute into this process, and a foreboding sensation came over me.  Nothing good was coming from these eggs.

I sent Anne off to school with two still warm eggs in a Glad ware container, expecting to hear all about egg dyeing that afternoon.

But, as soon as she got in the car: “Mommy, we didn’t do the eggs today because so many people didn’t bring them in yet.  So they have to bring them in tomorrow and we’re gonna do them tomorrow.”

I was mollified and somewhat smug.  I’d gotten her eggs to school.

Ha.  (Mommy lesson: never feel smug.  It will bite you in the ass.)

Thursday

Thursday the twins climbed into the van after school, and all Anne could talk about was the eggs.

“Mommy, we dyed the eggs today!  Guess what color mine are!”

“Pink?”

“Yes, pink!”

When we got home, she cradled the eggs to her chest in their tiny bit of egg carton and raced upstairs, yelling, “I’ve got to keep them warm so they can hatch!”

Wait, what?

“Anne!”  I bellowed.  “Do NOT sit on those eggs!  Do you hear me?  Do NOT SIT ON THE EGGS!”

She poked her face around the stair railing.  “Well, how am I supposed to keep them warm, then?”

“It’s almost 80 degrees outside.  They’re plenty warm.  Besides, if you sit on them, they’ll crack and you’ll get shell everywhere.”

Later that night, as we were putting the kids to bed, Anne proudly announced to Mark that she was keeping her eggs warm in the house so they could hatch baby chicks.

“Um, I don’t think so,” he said.

“Yep, not gonna happen,” I said.

“Yes, it is.  I have to keep them warm, and then the baby chicks will hatch out,” she insisted.

“Anne,” I said, “there are no chicks in those eggs.  Trust me.  Besides, what would you want with chicks?  Do you know what happens with chicks?  They grow up to be chickens.  And then we’d have chickens.  And you really don’t want chickens.”

“Why?”

“Because then you’d have to kill them,” Mark said.  “Now go to sleep.”

“Why would you have to kill them?” she asked, wide eyed.

“To eat,” he said.

“How do you kill a chicken?” she asked.

“You catch it, and then you chop off its head,” Mark told her.

“Ok, I think we’re really getting away from the point here, which is that there are no chicks in these eggs,” I said.  “And I know this because I cooked them.”

Anne turned to me, her chocolate eyes wide.  “Mommy, you cooked my chicks?  Why did you cook my chicks?”

“There were no chicks.  These were chick-less eggs.  Don’t worry about it.  Goodnight.”

Friday

This morning Anne was still carrying her eggs around the house, cooing to them as if they’d hatch any moment.  Mark and I kept reminding her not to drop them.

So of course, she dropped one.

The egg merely cracked and we got pieces of shell on the kitchen floor, but Anne?  Anne erupted like Mount Vesuvius.  Tears.  Wailing.  Hysterics when Mark threw the egg away.  And finally, a retreat to her bedroom and a refusal to come out.

“Anne?”  I called up from the foyer.  “Sweetie?  What’s going on?  Why won’t you come down?”

She appeared at the top of the stairs.

“It’s because I’m worried about Burt.  He’s lonely.”

“Burt?  Who’s Burt?”

“My other egg!”

“You named an egg Burt?”  I started laughing.  All I could think was that the egg in the trash must be Ernie.

She cracked a smile, too, before remembering that she was furious at me.

When she finally came downstairs, she and Grant played in the living room while I tweeted news of the first egg’s demise.  And then I heard it.

Crunch.

“Oh, no!  Was that Burt?”

“Yes!”  Grant said, running to me.  “She dropped Burt!  You need to bake her some more eggs right now, Mommy!”

Anne tearfully offered up the bright pink, cracked egg.  Yep, she’d dropped Burt.  I hugged her and couldn’t help but laugh again.  “Anne, this is great news!  You’ve solved your problem!  You don’t have to worry about Burt being lonely anymore!  He’s going to be in the trash with Ernie!!!”

She was not amused.  Grant continued to demand that I “bake her more eggs, or else I’ll show you some Kung Fu moves.”

“Ok, Grant?  You do not order Mommy around.  And your Kung Fu moves look like Spiderman poses.  Also?  You do not bake eggs.  You boil them.  And I’m not making any more because  you’ll break them.”

“No we won’t!”

“Yes, you will.  Y’all break everything.  Name one thing you haven’t broken.”

He thought for a few seconds, then looked triumphant.  “You!  We haven’t broken you, Mommy!”

“You can’t break me.”

“We haven’t torn you to pieces,” he said.

Where the hell is my son hearing this stuff? I thought.  And should I check his room for hacksaws?  “Not true,” I said, grimly.  “You two ripped my abdominal muscles four whole inches apart when I was pregnant with you.”

“AHA!!!  We did it!”  Grant yelled, jumping in the air and pumping his fist.  “We broke Mommy!”

What.  The.  Hell.

“Yes, and you continue to break Mommy’s mind every day,” I said, calmly.  Then I thwacked him on the head with the mini-box of raisins I was putting into his lunch box.  “Hurting people is not funny.  I don’t want to hear you joking about it again, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Anne was silent the whole drive to school.  She didn’t hug me goodbye.  She wouldn’t even tell me goodbye.

So now I have a migraine and a daughter who isn’t speaking to me and two broken eggs named Bert and Ernie doing God knows what in the trash.

And that is why Easter eggs are a bad idea.