We got our eggs colored this year just under the wire, with only 5 eggs broken in the process, minimal bickering about who had access to which color, and just one expletive-riddled sigh after the boys ran off to play and Dave thought the spilled liquid may have permanently stained our new countertop (for the sake of the holiday, I’m glad to say it did not).

But now the boys are in bed and I am left to reflect on something that has puzzled me since becoming a parent:

All those years with me and my siblings as little kids, when we’d wake up on Easter Sunday and peer from the upstairs hallway down into the living room, excitedly pointing out where we could spot the brightly colored eggs stashed around the room… how did my parents pull that off?

Did they set their alarm for the wee hours as we still slept, creep around hiding our (5 x dozen) colored eggs, and then go back to bed, only to have us wake them shortly thereafter to go find said eggs? Surely they wouldn’t have hid them before going to bed, otherwise they’d be left out an extended period and are, in fact, a food very much at risk of going bad when left out. But – also surely – my parents are not the type of people to voluntarily forgo sleep for anything frivolous, as evinced by the fact that they were known to set all of the clocks in the house back 1 hour on Christmas Eve so that they could sleep 1 additional hour before we were allowed to wake them at “9am.” (Aside: no wonder those Christmas mornings felt torturously long as we played cards in my sister’s room and anxiously watched the clock.)

Evidently some people skirt the issue by hiding plastic eggs instead, but then why do they color all of those hard boiled eggs? In a plastic egg family, what does one do with all those hard boiled eggs? Is the journey the destination, whereby the activity is simply to color them, and then into the refrigerator they go until they’re relegated to your dad’s breakfast for the next 7 consecutive days? If so, it seems an awfully anti-climactic end given the emphasis and tradition around the coloring event itself.

Suffice it to say, I am perennially stumped and will sadly be setting my alarm for 4:30am tomorrow in hopes that I can hide the hard boiled eggs and catch another hour of sleep before A bursts in, loudly asking to watch his recent favorite series, Helper Cars.