Easter is a Lovely Time!

Greetings and salutations!

  Life has been a whirl-wind! Between work, school, skidamirink, JD, and the rest of life I hardly know what day it is at this point! This past weekend, however was Easter weekend. It was a blast. Despite the ever looming deadline of my prospectus presentation that was due yesterday (Monday) I managed to take the weekend and have some needs time with my family. We decided to have a family Easter dinner on Saturday with my family and then we went to Easter lunch at JD's grandparents (who are so adorable I can only hope to be in love like they are when I am their age!)
 
   I found myself wondering on Thursday what exactly I could do to decorate for Easter on Saturday. I had purchased an adorable EASTER wood carving thing on sale at Walgreens:

So that was cute and all, but I felt it needed something more. Being the Pinterest addict that I am I decided to do some looking and found the perfect craft! Neglecting my homework in the name of arts-and-crafts-bonding with skidamirink we went to Michaels and bought lots of colors of embroidery floss and a few packages of balloons. We made our own Easter egg decorations! How you ask? The inspiration came from Crafty Endeavor and immediately caught my eye. It was a titch more messy than I thought it would be (skidamirink actually wouldn't touch it because she didn't like the way the liquid starch felt) but it was initially easy and fun! 

So obviously balloons were the first place to start. The original blog said to use water balloons because of the smaller size and I should have listened. I used regular balloons and blew them up smaller but they were still a little big in the end to work with. I made the liquid starch with corn starch an water which proved a little more difficult to do than I thought. In fact I am still not sure that I did it quite right but it all worked out in the end. I wish I could give you the recipe for it, but I pretty much improvised so I'm not sure what I did! I let it cool and filled pie pans with the liquid starch.

I picked the pie pans because you have to wrap the floss in a circle around and I figured that the pie pan would work bestt as it is not too deep or too large. It worked great. 

From here we (JD did a whole 2 for me...thanks dear) wrapped the floss around the balloons however we wanted! The idea is that you then leave them to dry, pop the balloons and have beautiful eggs to make an Easter garland or however else you chose to display them. 

Once they were wrapped we let them dry.

Now I don't have pictures of the next part because I was alone and a little frustrated. After I popped the balloons the next night, I was surprised to find that the balloons did not deflate. The blog I was following said nothing about this, so I am wondering if this is because I may not have done the liquid starch exactly right, but I do not know. So...I popped the balloon and nothing happened. I laughed a lot while attempting to pry the balloons away from the hardened floss mainly so that I wouldn't cry do to stress and lack of sleep (it took over 1.5 hours to get all the balloons out of the hardened eggs, which as far as I can tell is not typical).  I worked and worked and finally......

Success!!! Now they were a little misshapen due to all the prying to get the balloons out, but they were incredible easy to re-shape so that was a blessing. I then took a thin metal stick we use to test if cakes and what not are done and I used that to scrape off the dried liquid starch that was left on the eggs. Then we hung them up! 

I then took the bags of starburst jelly beans I bought, and the Gerber Daisies and made a centerpiece: 

Easter dinner consisted of bacon wrapped pork loin, bacon wrapped sweet potatoes, a green bean feta salad, cheddar filled corn meal biscuits (all thanks to Kraft.com) and my sister made her cheesy hashbrown potato thingy that I don't eat. Over all it was a very successful Easter and I am so glad I got to spend it with family. 

On a side note, literally while I was typing this and skidamirink was playing with magnets in the kitchen (or so I thought) I noticed she got too quite (parents you know what I mean). So I asked her what she was doing and when her response was "I don't know" I knew I was in trouble. That being said, my beautiful girl with long (almost to her waist) curly hair....

This was Sunday

She is now my beautiful girl with incredible short hair....

I have cried for over an hour now....and I know it's just hair...but I can't help it. She keeps telling me that "it's ok mom, I'm still a princess" but it is so different! I know it'll grow back, but she looks like a new person and I can't get past it yet. I'm sure by tomorrow I'll be better but I'm pretty traumatized at this point. I was bawling in Great Clips trying to ask them to fix it,  fortunately for me I'm not the first mom to have this experience, and so when I asked "can you fi..." and started sobbing, they knew what I needed. The stylist was great and helped calm skidamirink too who kept telling me "I don't want to be a boy!" and now she keeps telling me how pretty she is. So I'm sad this is how her first true haircut had to come about, but I guess it could always be worse. 

What about you? Any awesome kid-cutting-hair stories to share?