Earth Scout Eggs

We resumed Earth Scouts again this past Monday after a couple of weeks' hiatus. I had taken our ES vests and foraging bags along on a Mothers' Day hike two weeks ago, with the plan of collecting leaves in homemade leaf presses, but finally figured out that when we're away from home, the kids are much happier running along the trail, doing what they want to do, and not being coaxed into any kind of guided activity. Point taken. I didn't even consider doing EarthScouts while we were camping--since we were outdoors in nature for nearly three days straight, we didn't really need additional encouragement.

I still needed to do some needling and wheedling to get everyone outside together on Monday--but we finally settled down on some old sheets with the goal of looking at and drawing birds. Being a sunny and breezy afternoon, there wasn't much bird activity going on, but we drew some out of our heads...and then I remembered the goose eggs. C's mother had blown* out two of them when she was there the previous day, and there was one left in the fridge.

I ran in to blow it out too, but succeeded in blowing it UP...oops...and instead found two last duck eggs in our fridge and blew those instead (we have a regular menagerie of eggs at our house). While we waited for the eggs to dry, I read An Egg is Quiet, which is a gorgeous book (I learned about the book here, and our library actually had it!), and then painted our eggs with watercolors.

Eventually the eggs were covered and when it became clear no more would emerge, the troops wandered off to Lego's, baseball and bikes, and I found these little wooden egg cups I had bought for Easter with the thought of decorating somehow, but never go around to it. I think they're perfect!

*While cleaning out my bathrooms recently, I ran across two nasal aspirators (a.k.a. snot suckers) from the children's infancy, and it turns out that, despite C's and his mother's skepticism, they are ideal egg-blowers (b.t.w., if you're grossed out by the thought of it, I either never or rarely used them to suck snot, if I did it was a long time ago and I washed it well, and I pretty much consider all baby bodily fluids--at least my own babies'--relatively innocuous)