Leia's Fossils

This is what Leia Rose had been waiting for: the ritual washing of her fossils! ; ) Our original plan was to do it during Annie's nap, but that turned into very special "Daddy Time," so Mamma decided to give Leia a treat and let her stay up so we could do it together. (Sure enough, we went out on the porch and stayed up until Leia literally said, "Mamma, I'm tired.") ; )
Leia Rose wanted two buckets of water: the blue one is soapy water, and the white one is rinse water. She dumped out all of her fossils on the table and then washed each one individually. Mamma's job was to dry them. Then we used the charts to identify each one as best we could.
Here is Leia Rose excited at her most precious find: . . .
"the tip of a T-Rex tooth!" ; ) (I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was just a significantly shaped rock.) ; )

Here is Leia Rose identifying a shell using the chart that I printed out from www. aurorafossilmuseum.com. They've got some really good info on that site!
But here is the chart Leia really preferred to use: her own identification chart. ; ) Yes, I have it sideways here, but if you look, you can see that she made lots of "T's" because that is kind of the shape of the sharks teeth. And now I see that on the second line she actually wrote "Puffin" because puffin bones were one of the things that could be identified. ; )
I already posted a picture of the sharks teeth, so I won't bore you with those again. These are from Leia's bag of treasures. (They are mostly shells, coral, & rocks.)
Here are the things we could really identify that I thought were interesting. From left to right: a fairly recent coral (which still hase some "things" growing out of it's little holes), a petrified coral, a piece of coprolite, a sting ray piece, a Drill C shell, and a bone from a cownose ray.
But here is my absolute favorite pile, . . . it's the one that Leia is most proud of because she "identified" all of the items herself. : ) "A clam shell," "a piece of a sand dollar," "the tip of a T-rex tooth!," "a real fish scale," and "a fossilized rock!" All of this imagination from some really common rock and shell fragments. ; )