This is the stuff show and tell is made of.

Anna found Zags sitting on a snake a couple of weeks ago.  After a brief moment of recoil, she asked me if she could take it to school the next day to show (off) to her class.  "Heck, why not?", I said.  It couldn't be worse than the cat skull she had brought earlier in the year.  And secretly, I swell with a tidbit of pride that my little princesses are, in fact, not princesses and have no qualms about picking up dead animals.  It makes me smile and barf in my mouth a bit at the same time.

So I picked out an old plastic container for her and sent her outside to do the dirty deed.  She gingerly picked up the reptile, placed in carefully in the container, and put the lid on it... at the precise moment the snake came back to life.  Apparently, average garden snakes are smart enough to play dead.  Needless to say, we requested that she release it back into the wild, which she did, that is, right smack dab in front of Zags.  Poor snake.  As if fighting for one's life once in one night wasn't enough.  Did I just catch myself feeling sorry for a lousy snake?  I'm becoming soft in my old age.