Goose Eggs

It has become very apparent that our goose couple need serious parenting classes, so rather than waste the eggs we decided to try our hand at dying them. Nearly blew my brains out emptying them. Missy broke the first one and I broke the last one. Altogether we had 19 eggs.

The yolk is a good size!! And no, we aren't the least tempted to fry one.

Missy is all about sensory input...

First she scrubbed them. When she had decided they were clean enough, James scrubbed them over again.

 The idea was to color them with natural colors from vegetables and seasonings. Boiled onion skins, tumeric, blueberries, etc.. did a pretty good job. We were trying to drip wax  to keep white speckles, but
in figuring out how to drip the wax we fell on the idea of melting birthday candles and the colored spots were pleasing to the kiddos, so we never took them off after dipping the eggs.

This is James' precious find.... an old rusty bucket from the top of the mountain near the caves. He's bent on planting flowers in it. :-)

 The final product included a few goose feathers.

Wallah! Our new table center piece.

James is doing really, really well with his school work right now. I'm holding my breath!! For every book he reads me, he is paid, but for every book he reads to me, I get to read him one or two. He's settled in to enjoy both sides of it and is surprising me with his knowledge. He is doing math facts and other school work without a fuss. The deal is I will pay him for piece work.... and he will pay me for tantrums. So far no tantrums.  I'm the one not making any money at our current rate. Steve was like, this is going to get kind of expensive... my response was, not near as expensive as it would cost to pay a tutor, which we would have to pay for  if he wouldn't work with me. So far the kid has made about $12 in a week and Steve is totally on board. James has  his eye on a little lego set with a tractor and a farmer and a pig and so he's carefully stashing his money away. We haven't had any wet pants since about January!!! I made the mistake of praising him for it after the first two weeks... he wet purposely the next day. Since then I've kept my mouth shut. He rather enjoys his play not being interrupted with having to have a shower. We'll leave it at that.