Something about December brings out the goofiness in kids and SLAC-kers are no exception.

We managed to discuss some important topics, including making sure the girls monitor this blog and approve of its content and we made decisions about the details of the sashes that will hold our badges (badging ceremony planned for late December!).

But then all goofiness broke loose as the girls competed with one another for who could balance a stuffed animal on her head the longest. We neglected to assign an official timekeeper so the winner’s name is lost forever.

We learned so much from Shelly, the girls decided they wanted to examine other animals. We’re probably not ready for dissections, but burying animals found by the girls or their parents and examining their bones later seems doable. By this point, we had buried two squirrels hit and killed by cars on our street. For this meeting, we had two non-venomous snakes and one large rat (one snake was found in our lake and the other snake and the rat were found by a SLAC-ker’s dad on their property in east Texas).

We’re conscious of disease, so we wear gloves and thoroughly wash our hands. Note: we need kid-sized gloves for future burials because these XXL  adult gloves were hard to wear.

Here the SLAC-kers examine Mr. Rat for obvious signs of injuries.

In this image, they’re practicing their ability to identify a non-venomous snake by the double row of scales after its cloaca.

We wrapped our specimens in cheesecloth in an effort to keep the bones together. We’re not sure it’ll work because the cheesecloth might disintegrate by the time the bones are ready for us, but it should be an interesting experiment.

Three bodies, three SLAC-kers. Everyone participated in the digging.

We had a hard time finding Shelly’s bones because a certain adult (who shall remain nameless) neglected to mark her burial spot. The girls weren’t going to let that happen again so they took it upon themselves to make location markers. Yes, they are fluffy, sparkly pom-poms. What did you expect?