Mushroom Hunter

I love the random books I find in the library's new books section.  One of my favorite picks this summer was this guy:

Yummm...deliciousness!  It describes all kinds of mushrooms and where to find them (hence Mushroom Hunter...).  Even luckier was that we had some pretty rainy weather during one of the weeks that produced....you guessed it....lots of mushrooms!!  Eagerly, I headed out to try and identify some of the mushrooms, but little did I know that I had a great mushroom hunter with me....the Beans!!  She immediately fell in love with grabbing mushrooms, identifying them using the book, and then making spore prints out of the mushroom caps.

Taking the cap off...

..protecting for over night spore release...

..and TA DA!! a few spore prints!!

Not only did Beans fall in love with mushroom hunting and spore printing, she became downright obsessive about the whole venture!

Beans on Wednesday (note the increase in mushroom caps...)

And again on Friday....obsess much?!?!?

The most exciting part of our mushroom hunting adventure was when Squeaks decided to pop an unknown mushroom into her little piehole.  Of course, this mushroom had to be one that, try as we might, we just could not find in The Mushroom Hunter.  A quick call to Poison Control (apparently one of several they had that week for the same reason) left us knowing that severe vomiting, hallucinations, and sweating would occur if this indeed turned out to be poisonous...all we had to do was wait.  So we did.  And there was no severe vomiting, hallucinations, or sweating.  We did manage to take a picture of the mushroom she ate just in case we'd have to bring them to the authorities later:

Now that we know what they look like and that they are not poisonous, I'd say its time to grab some more and start using them to cook with, that is if we can keep them away from Beans trying to take their caps off and make more spore prints with them!!!