i'm a survivor!

i think children are well adapted to survival, even if dropped off in the middle of the forest. they are natural scavengers. i sat on my back deck last night and the girls played around me as i chilled on my reclining deck chair (God bless the person who invented that!), and i was alternately amused and amazed. meg, fashioning a spoon by pulling the stem end of a leaf through the face of another another leaf, just enough for it to be held in a concave curl; kyra, running a sturdy stick through the rings of the swingset to suspend a bucket of clean water (for "stew"); collecting dry sticks for firewood, covering their "drinking" water with a cloth so it stays clean overnight, pulling up the wild chives & onions that grow in our yard to "eat", dividing tasks and "chores" so everyone is pulling their weight... i mean, i'm not saying i'm going to abandon them in a forest somewhere and see how it goes, i'm just saying that they're much more instinctive survivors than say, the grown-ups on 'survivor'. :)