Funky-Looking Earth Eggs

I really dislike Easter eggs. I used to like them growing up - the pastel colors, the funky dye, and especially the mess. This mess is what originally put me off - I always rationalized that the kids were too young and food dye too permanent to intermingle with each other. Now I have put them off long enough - this is really the year. Mostly because Lily has a passion and enthusiasm for all things Easter that I have ever seen (mmm...maybe because it's close to her birthday? Could it be the candy perhaps???) Anyway, I can't let the kids go through life without ever coloring Easter eggs, could I? Well, worse things have happened.

The primary problem with the eggs is that I don't know how to hard boil them. I can cook fairly well, create ocean, sun, and firetruck cakes, but I have no clue how to boil eggs. My first mistake was using the organic brown ones from the fridge (unfortunately we are egg snobs). I don't know what I did next, but one partially-cooked one blew up in the water. The others came out okay, with an occasional crack here and there. Then the dye issues began. We are an experimenting family, so we ended up mixing colors, and we never measured vinegar/water/anything we were supposed to (measuring is for sissies). It all evolved into some sort of twisted science project. We now have 4 brownish-bluish-green-speckled-funky-looking "earth" eggs. And we all had fun in the end, right?