Saturday, March 08, 2008

Unschooling entrepreneurs

Today began with a blind taste test. Gillen brought home one of his first turkey eggs from the farm yesterday. Having given the two other eggs he found to a chef in Atlanta to sample, he wanted to find out for himself how the turkeys' eggs stack up to those from the chicken.
Happily, I preferred the one on the left, laid by the turkey. He got very excited and made a chart in his new notebook in which to record how many eggs are laid by each of his four female turkeys, and on what day of the week.

In other entrepreneurial news, I got the beautiful buttons I ordered from Dagny and Andrew in the mail the other day. They came with a handwritten note hoping that I loved them. I do. And I love the note. It was very cool to find a product that I happen to really like, buttons with cool quotes, made by teen unschoolers hoping to make enough money to pay for Andrew's attendance at the Live and Learn Unschooling Conference in Sept. I wore them on my coat the first day.Then yesterday, Gillen asked for and wore the "What we are shouts louder than anything we say" button (I think he is trying to tell us something:) Today he agreed to give it back long enough for me to see how it looked with the other two on my purse. I am indeed wearing a very warm coat, inside of our house, due to the "signs of spring" being covered by a layer of white hail this morning. It's cold!

There was an entrepreneurial fair at the Live and Learn conference in N.C. last year. Mindy's kids sold their duct-tape wallets, cell phone cases and head bands. There were rocks painted by Hayden (we have a welcome sign he made, welcoming birds to Gillen's garden), shrinky-dink magnets made by Tabitha, and lots of other amazing kid and parent creations as well.

Jesse has been busy this week making a new Pokemon-like card game that he wants to sell at this year's fair. I don't know that he will want to go the distance to finish it and reproduce it, but he has had a blast making it and talking about it this week.

Here is Dagny and Andrew's etsy shop where you can buy buttons, monster bags, and guitar string bracelets.

4 comments:

Molly said...

If only I lived closer I would surely give those turkey eggs a try! Reminds me of a book I read about the Farralon Islands in the SF Bay - during the Gold Rush when San Francisco was booming, there weren't enough eggs so some entrepreneurs made the dangerous trek out to these islands (which are notorious for great white sharks) to gather sea bird eggs. They tasted a little fishy for eating by themselves, but they worked perfectly in baked goods!

mindy said...

We call the way you fixed the eggs, "solidier sipps". It came from John's childood. The kids have been asking for soldier dipps repeatedly, but sadly, we don't have any of those cute little egg cups in which to hold them.

So the turkey eggs taste better huh? Very cool experiment!

And if Jesse completes the card game, we would like to reserve a copy. Awesome idea and a sure money maker at the conference.

mindy said...

I meant to write "soldier dipps"...we cut toast into long strips and dip them into the eggs.

Madeline Rains said...

yes, we call them that too, because of Nicolas. Guess it is a European thing. We cut strips of toast and those are the soldiers. Kind of strange, actually. ; )

Molly, that is so interesting. Gillen thought it was cool too.