And Then There Were Worms

I am leaving for Camp Likealottafives this morning. Wish me luck! I'll have wi-fi and my laptop and iPad and coffee, so life should be sweet.

Before I head off into the wild of Camp Likealottafives, let me tell you a little story about my own wildness. In my classroom.

I have a worm compost bin. Have you heard of these? Like, state-of-art recycling. Complete greenie heaven. It looks something like this:

It's just a neat and tidy heavy duty Rubbermaid container. It has soil and leaf mold and peat, and lots and lots of red wiggler worms. We add leftover veggies and fruits to it, the worms compost it and out comes the best composting material a garden has ever seen. 

There are some rules. 

1) Keep them moist

2) Keep them fed

3) Keep the lid loose

Guess what happens when the lid is not left loose? 

So last Monday I unlock my room and flip on the lamps and turn on a little Tony Bennett. I clickclick my way down to the office and back in my cute little heels. As I am walking towards my room I notice that there appears to be a bunch of junk outside my room on the floor. Dirty grass, maybe. I get closer and I notice it's very dirty and almost black looking squiggles. 

You're smart. You know what I'm about to tell you.

Worms. Worms in my hallway. 

Worms on my carpet. All. Over. The. Carpet. 

Thousands. 

Worms on the bottom of my cute little heels.

I knew immediately what had happened, and as I wailed a very loud "oh NOOOOoooooooo" I rushed over and pried the lid off. The tightly closed lid. 

There were thousands of worms hanging down on the inside cover. Thousands on the rim. Clumps on the floor. All looking for a little oxygen. 

Fivers came from school-age-care and helped me get them all back into the bin. There were, like, solid clumps of worms the size of my fist on the carpet. Clumps. Of. Worms. 

A lot of them had died. We put them back in anyway, thinking, you know, that the living worms would take care of them. 

They didn't. 

You know the smell after a big long rain? The kind of rain that goads all the worms out of the soil and onto your sidewalk/driveway? That smell? You might think it's the smell of rain on asphalt. It's not. I recognized it in my classroom. It's the smell of dead worms. 

My room smelled like that for TWO DAYS. 

Now, if you think I'm crazy for having these in my room, please reconsider. I get to teach my Fab Fours to be stewards of the earth, about gardening and soil and composting. The worms aren't supposed to get be able to get out of the container. 

I have reconsidered getting a snake for my room.