Seamus and I have been faithfully tending to these eggs for two weeks as of yesterday. It was blind optimism for the first week and a half or so, as I really had no idea if they’d died or what. We’d candle them and not see anything recognizable.

This week though, it’s pretty clear that at least seven of the nine are developing. I wanted to take some pictures showing the neat veins and the shadow of the embyros in the eggs, but that’s just a little tricky by myself.

So he got to stay up a little late last night to help me photograph them. We had the camera relatively stable, but it’s pretty darn difficult to hold an egg and a flashlight out at arm’s length for such a long exposure without moving at all. Most of our photos turned out to be duds; I may make a cardboard box to document their growth next week, when I won’t have three hands around.

As we were farting around with them, we could see the duck inside twitch and move. On one of them, we could fairly clearly see the yolk sac, so I explained what that was.

I haven’t talked to his teacher in person yet, but my intention is to bring the eggs into the third-grade classroom when they’re close to hatching. I’ll have to bring them home at night and on weekends, of course, but the kids will get a huge kick out of watching them. I’ll have to ask her to call me if they hatch on her watch so I can take some pictures.

And hey, if I’m lucky, maybe some kid in the class has a duck pond at home, and wants to take them. It’s worth a shot, after all, that’s how I grew up having chickens and ducks myself. Class projects led me into this, and back to class projects it shall go.

Meanwhile, it looks like it’s time to go shop for brooder equipment. A galvanized trough should do the job nicely and also fit in my laundry room. How I’m going to sequester them from both the cat and the dogs, now, that’ll be a challenge.