Full of $^!+

This weekend, we took advantage of the warmer weather and drove to Bloomington. There we checked out the winter market (more on that later), got down and dirty in a park and visited an organic gardening store.

You would have thought my kids had died and gone to heaven. No, it wasn't because of the plants to explore, because there weren't any offered for sale.

Instead, it was all about the poop.

My daughter's been obsessed with the idea of worm poop as fertilizer ever since we experimented with some last year. (No, worm castings don't smell, it's a dark-brown consistency, and truthfully looks like a heavier (but not clayish) dirt.) In the height of her curiousity, she even asked a poor worm on our driveway after a rain, "Hey worm, did you poop?" I'm not sure why she wanted to know. I don't know that I want to know.

So at the garden store, she flocked to the gardening "enhancements" area, and proudly pointed out the worm poop to her toddler brother. They mushed the bag and looked at the sample baggie of worm castings. They banged on the different packages of enhancements and noted which were softer and which were not.

But the highlight of our excursion was learning that there just wasn't worm poop in this world. Oh yes, variety is the spice of life, and you can have it in your castoffs too. Chicken. Seabirds. Bat guanos from around the world. (The garden catalog even had a world sampler!) But in the end, we stuck with the garden-variety earthworm castoffs, which worked for us last year quite well.

At an age where you're already dealing with the "shock value" of potty talk, poop is all the rage. And they love getting away with discussing it in the context of gardening. It's quite impressive to a four-year-old. Days later, my kiddos are still talking about the trip.