It doesn’t really seem quite right to post this right in the middle of all the Christmas decorating and reminiscing posts, but here goes. This blog entry comes with a *****WARNING — DO NOT GO ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH***** I can hardly stand to look at these pictures long enough to find some to post!
Amanda is studying Human Anatomy (advanced biology) this year and she’s to the section where she’s supposed to dissect a cow’s eye. Fortunately for her (NOT – lol) we ran out of hamburger this week. I called the butcher to order 30 pounds of hamburger and an eye >VBG>. She insisted we couldn’t use a “live” eye, but we assured her it was no longer alive and that she really didn’t want to go the smelly preserved route. The worst part about dissection, imo. is the SMELL…. I’m happy to report there was NO SMELL involved in this dissction project.

She likes biology, but she does NOT like dissecting… it took some convincing to get her to even hold the eye.

She wasn’t quite to the dissecting point in the book…. that wasn’t supposed to be for another few days.. but we had the eye so we pressed on and read the book while dissecting. One of us had to take pictures and turn the pages of the book so I volunteered and managed to not have to touch the thing once!

The kids and I all screamed when the jelly type substance came out…. I don’t remember the name of it and she’s still in bed so I can’t ask her… hmmm… maybe I should have had her write this blog.

Whenever there’s a hand on project of any kind ALL of the kids want to participate! Josh and Emily both enjoyed it more than Amanda. Emily didn’t like wearing the gloves.

Here they are getting ready to make the first cut.

Tim did some of the initial cutting and then he made Amanda do it herself. We did tell her it would work best if she LOOKED at the eye while dissecting it. We didn’t want her to cut her fingers!

After the initial shock it wasn’t so bad…

It was interesting to see that it is transparent.

Nathan came over for one quick look to see what was going on when we all let out a scream and then he went back to playing with his trucks.

Amanda dissected every part and found all of the things she was supposed to find.

After they were done… they cleaned up the mess. I don’t think it was as bad as she thought it was going to be. All that’s left now is writing up the report.