It's that time of year again, folks -- time to bust out the hard boiled eggs and the Paas egg dyes!! Momma and I picked some Paas up at Walmart yesterday, and after a few false starts (including a run to Farm Fresh to get the vinegar we forgot that's necessary for the egg dye -- DOH!) we got down and dirty with the colouring of the easter eggs.
They got some nifty colours nowadays!!! Momma was lamenting the lack of Paas when she was a girl -- all she had was blue, green, yellow, and red. "And I had to walk uphill four miles to school in the snow in a mini skirt and high heeled boots when the temperature was 100 below and so much snow that you couldn't see the cars over the drifts the snowplow piled up!"
Ahem. But we had bright pink and bright jade and yellow and orange and lime green and bright green and bright blue and some other ones I can't remember. The eggs turned out gorgeously -- but it wasn't till we'd already had eggs resting in the pop-out holes on the bottom of the box that we realized we needed the box to read the directions for the egg wrappers. So none of our eggs have wrappers on them.
Kurt came over in the midst of dyeing and made a really pretty two-coloured egg -- and in the middle between the two colours he wrote "Kurt and Karyl Love 4Ever." Awwwww.... ;o)
I found something out about my mother yesterday that I never realized. My mother was, in her younger years, a repressed tomboy. No seriously! She was all frou-frou back in the day, with her skirts and her makeup and her perfectly combed (but rarely styled) hair. Yesterday when she came to pick me up from school she noticed that I'd worn a dress to surprise her (she loves seeing me all prettied up because it happens so rarely). Then she said, "Look at me -- you're dressed like the mother, all dressed up and pretty, and I'm dressed like the teenager with my sweats and my baseball jersey and ballcap!" Momma's comfort clothes are her Baltimore Orioles shirts and her sweatpants. That's all she wears when she comes home from work or on her days off. Thank goodness she has many shirts and many pairs of sweats. :o)
I was never a repressed tomboy. My mother loves to tell the story of one of the first times we came to visit after Dad got custody of us. She was waiting there at the airport (I don't know why we flew -- we lived just four hours' drive north at the time), and she saw Michele get off the plane with what looked like a little boy beside her. Apparently my sister has very strong mothering instincts because Momma assumed that Michele had found a little boy to take care of on the flight, and that I would follow soon afterward. It wasn't till I ran to give Momma a hug hello that she realized that "little boy" was me. See, my stepmother had chopped off my beautiful waist-length blonde hair when I came to live with her and Daddy because she said I cried too much when she combed it. She combed my hair with a fine-tooth comb with no regard for the snarls in it. Very painful. So she cut it up to my ears, and it had turned brown. Which resulted in my mother not recognizing me at the airport. :o)
Which brings to mind a similar occurrence, this time during the summer after my fifth grade year -- right after school let out. I went to get my hair cut because I was tired of it being long (I grew it out again after Marty cut it short), and I was encouraged to do so by my teacher Mrs. G. Her name was too long for most of us to pronounce, let alone spell, hence Mrs. G. She thought I'd look good with short hair. So my sister and I biked up to the shopping plaza in the little town in Illinois where we lived at the time, and I got my hair basically chopped off. The lady who cut it didn't quite do what I wanted, and it turned out not very nice looking. I came home on my bike without Michele for some reason, and the screen door of our house was locked because our live-in babysitter, Mrs. Alford, didn't want my baby brother getting out of the house. So I rang the doorbell, and when Mrs. Alford came to the door, she said, "Karyl can't come out to play because she isn't home right now." I just stared at her for a moment and said, "Mrs. Alford, I am> Karyl!" She was a bit embarrassed after that!
I'm not sure if any of the folks I knew in high school would recognize me or not. I was so different back them -- and not just in appearance. I was a little thinner, but I had glasses, and long dark blonde/light brown hair. Now I have short red hair, no glasses, and a totally different and more positive outlook on life. High school just sucked -- but I think it's that way for everyone. I'm so much happier with who I am now.
Have a positive day, won't you???