This weekend

Well, the weather is no longer really great for outdoor play. It's been cold, very windy and wet (either rain or snow or a combination of the two). Thankfully we had some fun inside things available to do this weekend.

Saturday morning Maya had dance class. Alex and I stayed home and played legos while Ben took her to dance.

After lunch we went over to the local library branch to see a presentation from Wings of Wonder, a local raptor rehabilitation facility. Their presentations are so cool. The kids love it and the grown ups love it just as much.

Alex brought his camera but was so mesmerized by the presentation he forgot to take any pictures of the birds!

When owls and some other Raptors digest their food their body takes all the parts that don't digest like bones, fur, feathers, etc. and makes a pellet out of it which the Raptor then coughs up and spits out. You can open the pellets and find the bones inside and try to reassemble the skeleton of the prey.

Both Alex and Maya wanted to try this so we got two pellets at the presentation. Later that afternoon Ben sat down with them to cut them open. Maya was totally into it. She was digging right in there. Poor Alex wanted to be into it but as soon as Ben cut the pellet open he started gagging (there was no smell, but he was convinced it was something that *should* smell bad) and he wouldn't touch it. So he would cough and gag and then Ben would find a bone and he'd yell "Whoa, cool!!" cough, gag......"Awesome!"...cough, gag.... He did a really good job identifying the bones on the bone chart that came with it.

Neither of our pellets had a full skeleton inside or a skull. But we did have some jaw bones and some other larger bones they could easily identify.