Thursday was Mia’s first science fair, and mine too, at least that I can remember, and so we crushed some eggs to celebrate. Other kids made volcanoes and grew lettuce and fussed with magnets, and one kid extracted DNA from an onion, which his mother insists is not really that difficult, but she’s a biochemist. Someone even took bacteria samples from around campus and let them get fuzzy in Petri dishes, and the results were sufficiently horrifying that Sarah could barely stand to look at the pictures, but that was a second-grader, I think, and those kids are smart. Us? We crushed eggs. And loved it.
It was more than it sounds, and maybe less. We put a cookie sheet on a two-by-four and rested one end of it on a raw egg (free-range, if that matters, which it doesn’t) encased in play-doh to keep it upright. Then we started piling books on top, one by one – first Mia the Beach Cat, then Goodnight Max, then 10 Little Rubber Ducks. By the time we got to Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, the egg was clearly scared, and when we slid Once Upon a Princess on top, gentle like a maternity nurse, the whole thing came crashing down, yolk and whites and shell heading for separate exits.
It sounds like fun and it was – fun and edifying and surprising, since who knew that the same 9.2 pounds of children’s books, stacked in the same order under the same conditions, would crush an egg whether it was standing upright or laying sideways? Certainly not Mia, who pointed out that the horizontal egg should be easier to smash “because it’s already a little flat,” and anyway, everyone knows the shell is thinner around the fat middle. I, for one, thought she was right on the money. We were both wrong.
