Yesterday was Jeff’s birthday. In addition to celebrating his birthday with a few friends who came over, we also had our annual egg hunt. The boys have been having an egg hunt every year together since they were old enough to start doing it. This year’s egg hunt was bit different, however. It was pouring rain outside and cold. On the spur of the moment we decided on an indoor egg hunt instead which turned out to be really fun. (My mom later reminded me that we did that sometimes when the weather was bad when I was a kid too.) The night before Bracken asked me why he didn’t get to be the one to hide the eggs. Good question. So first the adults hid the eggs and the boys found them. Then the boys hid the eggs and the adults found them (or rather the boys, in their excitement, showed us where most of them were which was pretty funny.) The grass in our baskets wasn’t really as ready as we would have liked it to be since we planted it too late, but it still worked. We didn’t even dye any eggs this year, I just hard boiled them. As friends and family said, the eggs from our chickens already come in all sorts of colors.

At the end of our indoor egg hunt, one hard boiled egg was unaccounted for. We searched everywhere. Either I messed up the count, an egg got eaten that I didn’t know about, or it’s still hidden somewhere. We’ve all been laughing about this. Either we’ll keep joking about the mysterious egg that disappeared… or we’ll start to smell something…

Our friend brought food to put in the oven, we enjoyed a delicious lunch, and Bracken and I made some birthday treats (one an experiment that turned out amazing, which I will be sharing here soon.) We put up the birthday banner, lit candles and sang Happy Birthday. Bracken made Jeff a little doll and said it was so that he could play with him. Bracken and I worked on a sewing project together in preparation for Jeff’s birthday. Bracken sat on my lap for much of the time that I sewed at the sewing machine and the rest of the time he played on the floor next to me while I finished it. The pattern was called Recycled Sweater Slippers, from the book ‘Sewing Green’. I didn’t have enough felted sweater left in one color to do the whole slippers, so we did them in two colors, which I thought turned out fun. The light grey and dark grey, with a little patterning on them, went well together. I knew Jeff could use some warm slippers. He’s always the first to wake up in the mornings and goes downstairs into the cold before the house gets warmed up for the day. His other slippers fit him like a glove and are hard to get off once he puts them on, so he hardly wears them. I thought if we could make him some slippers that were easier to take on and off, that they would get a lot of use. (Turned out to be right since he already had them on for the entire day of his birthday.) I had only made the pattern one other time, in a very small size (which I created myself by looking at the pattern) for a little friend’s birthday. That size was challenging to sew and I thought this larger pair would be much easier to sew. Seemed logical enough. But one of the felted sweaters I chose to make Jeff’s slippers with was extra thick and turned out to be incredibly challenging to sew. My thread kept getting in horrible tangles and the whole project took a lot of willpower to get through. I’d like to say the project was a breeze, but it was actually really frustrating. (I won’t try to sew such thick sweater material again.) When it was all said in done, I breathed a sigh of relief and then I really hoped the size was going to fit him. His birthday slippers were made with love. (And a bit of cussing on the side. I wouldn’t be completely honest if I didn’t also mention that.) Bracken was delighted to give them to his dad the morning of his birthday. They fit great, they’re much easier to take on and off than his other slippers, and Jeff truly loves them.