Pine Cones and Deer Poop

If you are easily offended by the vision of animal waste, please do not scroll down any further.

Today, the kids had a day off from school for a Teacher's In Service Day (training). To celebrate, we had the 1st annual Pine Cones and Deer Poop Collection Contest. Prizes ranged from $.50 to $2 to the winner who brought in the most stuff the fastest. We told the kids to view this as a warm-up for the Easter Egg Hunt coming up later this month. Anyway, this is probably the best motivational idea I've had to get the kids outside and working to date. They picked up more than 12 plastic grocery bags full of pine cones (I was still stuck cleaning up the deer poop) and they cleared the lawn and surrounding areas in about 7 minutes.

I was so happy, I've written a folk song about it entitled none other than "Pine Cones and Deer Poop" but I won't make you endure listening to it until it's picked up by a recording studio.

That's it for now...unless you really want to see the picture of some of the stuff nature drops on us.