A Marianna Moment: My Egg Basket

We have a great cub scout program. I'm really enthusiastic about it. We have good leaders (besides me, of course lol) but not all are quite as enthusiastic as I am. One of my best friends (Sara) is scout motivated also, and she and I were talking about some motivational ideas we had. One of them was to award the leaders with a walking stick and then from time to time, award them a trinket they can hang on their staff. So to get that started, I'm making the sticks. Morgan needs to do a family project for one of his merit badges, so he's helping me with it (the whole family is, actually).

Yesterday, Morgan and I went out to our muscadine vines and started cutting out briars and scrub trees that had started growing up in them. We haven't pruned those vines in a couple years now, so they were pretty crazy. Morgan had a small hand saw and I had loppers. Together we cut out a bunch of stuff, and some of it was big enough that we got some walking sticks out of it. YAY!

So I sat a chair out there where we cut those things and Morgan and I stripped the bark off of 2 of them. It was a pretty day yesterday, lots of sunshine....I have a sunburn now..great... but anyway,... it was a lot of fun for Morgan and I, but very exhausting too.

At one point, I had to sit down and rest. I had a drink, had my tools by me, had my hot pink chair...I was good....and then I realized the stems and twigs and things I had Morgan dragging off to a burn pile also had some muscadine vines and tendrils in them.

*LIGHTBULB*

I took a few of them and wove some wreaths, thinking these would make great dreamcatchers or could be a door wreath, whatever I wanted. I did 4 of them, in different sizes. The smallest one caught my attention....it made me think of a basket top. Next thing I know, I've spent 2 hours cutting pieces of those of vines we had trimmed and rapping them around themselves, sort of like a birds nest. I'm so proud of it!

We also have chickens. We've had these same chickens since last fall, and not one egg. These are Ameraucana hens, which means they lay colored eggs...when they lay. Well 3 days ago, they started laying! We've gotten blue eggs (kind of greenish blue) and some that are like brown eggs, except more of a pinkish brown. COOL! So to test out my basket, I had the boys put some of the eggs we got from our chickens into the basket.