The First Great Egg Drop Challenge

When the kidlets woke up last Saturday, I told them that at 3:30 p.m. I was going to give each of them a raw egg, and that we were going to drop it from the upstairs balcony by the office onto the sidewalk.  Their job was to build a container to hold the egg.  If the egg survived the drop without breaking, they could cross off one job off their job list without doing it.  They got to work right away.

I had envisioned my cardboard, duck tape loving kidlets to grab boxes and containers and fill them with poofy materials.  That’s how I would have gone about the challenge.

Instead, they grabbed a roll of tin foil.  “Yeah!  This stuff is great!  It is totally going to protect our eggs!” and a few small sheets of felt and a tiny bit of stuffing fiberfill from the basement craft area.

It was very enlightening to watch.  The Banana’s egg holder looked like a felt ice cream cone with ribbons across the top to hold the egg.  Mr. SP’s was somewhat similar, except he glued on some pom poms and covered the top of the egg with felt, and added a bit of extra tin foil for good measure.  YaYa used a lot of layers of tin foil  and stuffing to make a nicely padded silver rocketship to hold her egg.

They couldn’t wait for 3:30 p.m.

The Banana’s egg was dropped first.  I think the egg might have actually fallen out of the cone before it hit the sidewalk and smashed into smitherines.

Mr. SP’s egg was next.  By some divine miracle it missed the sidewalk and landed in a bush with a soft bump and the egg remained perfectly intact.  You should have SEEN his victory dance as he whooped and hollered down the stairs and out the back door.

YaYa’s egg was last.  It ALMOST made it, but when we opened up her egg holder, we discovered the end of the egg cracked just a tiny bit.  She squeezed it and raw egg came splurting out all over the place, which was a bit frustrating to me since I specifically had said, “Don’t squeeze!”

At first she was humorously disappointed, but when I got frustrated about the squeezing, she got angry back, and then she was hysterically furious because she didn’t believe it was fair that Mr. SP’s egg hadn’t actually landed on the sidewalk, and she was grossly overworked anyway.  So there was a bit of a snit.

And I understood that it WAS frustrating.  However, if I had said that Mr. SP’s egg had to go again, I would have been in just as much hot water for not being fair and making his egg go twice when I didn’t actually say it couldn’t land in the bushes.  Really, it was not a winning situation for the Mama.

Eventually, several hours later when Daddy came home, he managed to commiserate with YaYa and calm her down and sympathize with her about how life just isn’t fair sometimes (I remained the evil maternal figure in the story).

In a few weeks we are going to have a second egg dropping challenge.  And I’ve learned a few things.  The next challenge will involve dropping an egg from the top of the step ladder in the middle of the driveway where there are no bushes.  The kidlets already have building plans in the works.

My back sidewalk has officially stopped smelling like raw eggs now.