Except that the ‘skin’ winds up thicker than the membrane; it’s actually fairly tough. You can bounce it. Hmm, I’m going to have to do some research on this; a quick search did not yield enough information.
The shell’s not gone. Vinegar (acid) reacts with the calcium carbonate in the shell to give off carbon dioxide. What’s left is some sort of calcium salt I think which changes the stiffness of the eggshell to something more rubbery.
Hmm. Calcium acetate salt according to this page. We used to do the same thing with chicken bones in school.
It hasn’t been three months, so I can still bump up this thread, right? Good, 'cause I’ve got some stories to tell.
We’ll start at the beginning. I’ve managed to cut my chin open not once, but twice - the first time when I was 18 months old and managed to push my “Sassy Seat” off the edge of the table, the second time after I decided to go down a slide head-first. My parents were visiting my aunt in the city that time, and momma said they got some funny looks from the ER doctors, bringing in this skinny child with scrapes and bruses all over her (yes, they were all self-inflicted).
Backstory on the next one - when I was 4 and a half, we moved to our current house. It had been a rainy winter, and the neighborhood was still very new, so we had a big puddle in our backyard. One of my friends came over to visit, and we decided to go skinny-dipping. In the puddle. In the middle of January. Of that, I only remember being washed off afterwards - I complained that the water was too hot, only to be informed that no, this wasn’t hot water, I was just really cold.
Then there was my first Pencil Tip Club - I was in second grade, and I was sitting at the table trying to do math homework. My mother was trying to help me, but I was getting extremely frusterated with her, for some unknown reason. (Probably she wasn’t explaining things right - momma likes to take shortcuts with math, and I was trying to do things by the book.) She shouted, I shouted, I waved my hands in the air for emphasis, and then, forgetting that I held a freshly-sharpened pencil in my hand, I slammed my fists on my knees. We tried to get the lead out, but we never did succeed, and to this day I have a little grey spot there. My other one isn’t nearly as dramatic - I managed to poke myself in the finger with a mechanical pencil, and the lead broke off.
Of course, I can’t forget the time I broke my front teeth. Some neighbor boy came over and asked to ride bikes with me, and so we rode around in circles in front of my house for a while. Then, I saw him stop his bike by grabbing the front tire between his feet, and I thought that was so cool I had to do it, too. Problem was, he was wearing sneakers, while I was wearing these pointy-toed boots. (I was damn fond of those boots, too.) The toes of my shoes caught in the spokes, I did a loopty-loop, and ended up on the ground, missing half of my right front tooth. We found the piece, and the dentist was able to glue it back on, but I always had an extreme sensitivity to hot and cold afterwards.
I’m surprised I don’t still have a scar from when I convinced a neighbor-friend of mine to pull me around on my roller skates with a rope attached to her bike. I had some nasty road-rash on the back of my shoulder from that little experience. (But damn, it was fun while it lasted!)
And then don’t even get me started on the times I cut the cat’s whiskers (it seemed like a good idea at the time!), pulled the school fire alarm (I was only going to touch it, really!), played blind-man’s bluff at the brick-lined edge of a poll (see: it seemed like a good idea at the time), or sliced my finger open while trying to cut the rubber covering off a dishdrainer with the nice sharp knife (although I was going into 8th grade when that happened, so I don’t know if it counts as childhood). You know, I’m pretty sure I stuck paperclips into electrical sockets as a kid. That’d explain a lot.
14 Doing burn pile duty, not realising that fire cracker wrappers would still have wrappers in it.
14 Putting what I was told was a bag of tissues in the burn pit, finding the aresol can in the ashes, and grabbing it out of the fire with a pitch fork rather than just covering the fire and going in the house, grabbing an adult to deal with it. We’re convinced that my scoop and heave actually caused the explosion (from hot to cool air).
When I was oh, 3 or so (back in the days when kids could play outside for hours without their mothers worrying the whole time), we had a litter of kittens.
My neighbor and best friend at the time, also 3, and I decided that the kittens wanted to go swimming. So we filled up her Ryder red wagon with water and off they went.
Only one died, so I guess it could have been worse …
Playing “freeze-tag” on a tennis court. A wet tennis court. I was “it” and somebody jigged past me, so I tried to change my direction of motion 180 degrees. I can distinctly remember the feeling of my feet flying into the air, and my chin diving to the ground. I put a huge gash in my chin that needed dozens of stitches, but I’m lucky I didn’t break my jaw.
Playing “war” with a bunch of kids - this absurd game consisted of two teams throwing rocks at each other accross a field. Unbelievable.
Insert your own allegorical comment here. 
I’ve always been very afraid of worms (heh, still don’t like them, to be honest!), so every time it would rain, I’d get teased by some of the other kids in my class. I think I was in 2nd grade when this happened (age 7), but one day coming home from school another girl in my class was chasing after me with worms/nightcrawlers, dangling them in my face and threatening to throw them on me. I had my little trusty umbrella and was using it to ward off her “attack” and accidentally (and I do stress the word accidentally) poked her in the eye with the tip of the umbrella. It wasn’t one of those metal tips, it was plastic, but it did injure her eye. I ran the rest of the way home, she went home bawling… and naturally I did -not- tell my parents what I had done. So later that evening they were horror stricken and shocked to get a call from the parents of the other girl… I can’t remember what my punishment was, but it was something awful. I’ve been extremely cautious with umbrellas ever since.
I’m in the Pencil Tip Club too!
It happened on my first day of high school 
Another pencil-tipper here, except mine is in the roof of my mouth (result of chewing on pencil, you see).
When we first moved into the family home (I was 3), I set some paper plates on the brand new kitchen tile and started whacking them with a meat tenderizer mallet. Imagine my surprise when my mother pointed out that this was producing holes in the tile as well.
Various things I did to my little sister when she was a baby:
-Pour an entire bottle of hairspray on her. Result: panicked mother, unhappy baby.
-Pour an entire bottle of baby powder on her. Result: very panicked mother rushing with baby into the shower to rinse her off, lest she inhale the powder
-Spill an entire can of cayenne pepper on her face. This one resulted in a trip to the emergency room for sister.
When I was about 4, my grandfather was cutting some roses with a pocket razor blade. I grabbed the blade out of his hand, and sliced my little finger quite well (I still have the scar). In the first grade, we were all sitting outside on the playground during PE. I found a small shard of glass, and rubbed the tip of my finger over its point. I then calmly walked over to the teacher and showed her my spurting fingertip. First time I ever saw a teacher in full panic mode, and the whole thing has left me with a very distinctive fingerprint on that finger.
Dumb:
I was teasing my younger sister and took her paper hole punch. It was a single hole pliers type. She was trying to grab it back and I was menacing her with it, opening and closing it. Although it had a guard, it pinched out a perfect circle in her finger.
Dumber:
I was bouncing a ball bearing, about 1-inch diameter, on the patio. (They bounce very well) My dad was tired of the noise and told me to, “knock it off”. Of course, I had to get in one last bounce and bounced it so it would carom out into the backyard. Unfortunately my aim was off a bit and it hit a piece of petrified wood, ricocheted and shattered the sliding patio door.
Dumbest:
My mother had some dried flowers on the TV. I had experimented with one type of frond and found that when lit it burned very slowly, similar to a firecracker fuse. I had performed my experiment outside in my secret laboratory (the backyard on the side of the house out of view) and was intent on showing my discovery to my older sister. She was not interested in coming outside, so I decided to demonstrate this wonderful phenomenon at the source.
I was able to douse the ensuing conflagration with the pot of water that my sister was about to use to make pasta for dinner, in anticipation of my parents returning from the grocery store. I ruined the TV, the walls behind the TV (it was in a corner), and the carpet under the TV. My parents arrived a few minutes later as I was smearing the soot into the wet plaster even more. I was sure I was on the executioner’s list for sure. It was so surreal. My parents were so pissed their faces so distorted it was as if I was seeing them through a fish eye lens. I don’t know what they were saying, and I’m not sure it was even words coming out of their mouths. After my entire life had flashed before my eyes, which didn’t take long because I was only about 9 or 10, my father finally growled, “get him out of my sight before I kill him”. My sister dragged me to my room. The next day I learned how to paint…
“Smoke Signals” with my brother’s robe (that if you squinted at it and had a good imagination could become close enough to an Indian blanket, a really good imagination) and lamp.
We really did notice before it actually caught fire - but not until after we’d burned a hole in it.
Also, “let’s see if the dog notices if we replace her normal drinking water with 7-up.” (it confused her. but she drank it anyway. then we gave her water.)
Me too! (Plus I also did a somersault over my handlebars and broke a tooth - ooooweeeoooo).
Anyway - chin injury #1. I must have been about 5, and was at my grandma’s. She told my aunt to take an empty laundry basket upstairs, and I thought it would be great to ride in it. The sides were just a tad taller than my inseam, so I had one leg in, lifted the other foot off the floor, and fell face-first onto the metal strip dividing the linoleum from the carpet.
Chin injury #2. Probably around 9, and should have known better. My friend was in our garage with the door shut (we’d been playing hide & seek), and I thought it would be funny to hold the door down while he tried to open it, then let go. The door came up, and the handle cracked me right in the chin. So now I have a squiggly scar from #1, with a straight scar right over it from #2.
When I was around 7, a bunch of my friends decided to go to an empty house on our street, and they started throwing pebbles at the windows. Completely forgetting any scrap of context or import, I thought, “That’s stupid - if they want to break the window, they should use a nice big rock, like *this * one.” Throw CRASH Honestly, if I had thought about what I was doing I wouldn’t have done it.
When I was in middle school, we used a wood stove to heat our house. One night I decided it was fun to dance around the family room with a plastic garbage bag, making it billow and so on. Of course it wound up landing on the five thousand degree stove and instantly transforming to some incredibly smelly and unremovable second skin.
What was the disastrous result from that? When I was in high school I occasionally gave my first ferret Mt. Dew and a StarBurst (boy did she like them both.) She was really wired at those times, but it didn’t seem to hurt her.
One summer day when I was 11, my mom left my brother and I alone in the house for a few hours and we really were behaving fairly well – she ruled with an iron hand, so we knew better than to get involved in any shenanegans.
As I was reading a comic book or some other innocent activity, I heard a most impressive shattering crash sound. It sounded precisely like a large crystal chandelier falling onto a cement slab. My brother came running and he was saying something to the effect of “Oh shit oh shit oh shit, you gotta cover for me! We’re busted!” (We?)
And then he explained. That morning I had bought a pack of three throwing darts at the store, just because I thought they might be cool. He had a neat idea – our bathroom was at the top of the stairs, and there was a foot gap between the top of the glass shower door and the ceiling, where you could see the back wall of the bathroom from the landing. He imagined tossing a dart in a graceful arc and smiling as it made a resounding thunk in the wallboard of the bathroom wall. Of course what really happened was different: he didn’t give it sufficient loft, and it struck the shower door, which immediately exploded into a million little bits of tempered glass. There’s no way you can talk your way out of that one.
Well, we did the best we could. He took the water glass from the bathroom sink and tossed it into the tub. He then concocted this story about taking a shower, getting out, grabbing a glassful of water from the sink, slipping on the wet tile floor, and then smashing the door with the glass. Don’t remember if he thought to wet the tub at all. Of course, I had to swear that it was all the gospel truth.
I don’t think they ever really bought it. Nobody out and called us liers to our faces, but there were subtle hints that let us know that they suspected that there was more to the story than we were telling. It took two years before they finally replaced the shower door, and since it was the “boys’ bathroom,” that meant we were limited to baths for those two years.
Oh yes, I’m sure that I can’t be the only one here who was mixing up black powder in his bedroom. Did lots of stupid stuff with it over the years, but the stupidest was when I blew off my eyebrows and eyelashes, mere days before leaving home for boot camp. I tried to slink past my folks when they were watching TV, but the evidence was glaring, and a half hour later I was sitting in front of a fancy machine with a doctor looking at my corneas telling me how lucky I was.
Another Pencil Tip Club Member here. Did it in second grade running up the basement stairs where I had just sharpened it and jabbed it accidently in my right wrist . Still there 30 years later.
Electricity Is Bad With Unsupervised Girl Scouts
When I was about 11 or 12, us suburban, white bread deer-caught-in-the-headlights girl scouts were on our Big Trip for the summer. The Money earned from schilling cookies door to door and we were going white water rafting in Pennsylvania. Hooray, we survive selling door to door and possible kidnapping, perverts, molestation and, the worse, the utter humiliation of having the Cutest Boy In Your Class see you in your dorky uniform answer the door as you try to sell him some Thin Mints so you can get your 50 Boxes Sold Badge; now we get to try to drown or get thrashed to death on sharp rocks in a raging river.
We spent the night on a farm somewhere in Ohio. Camping out and there was a standard keep-the-cows- out kind of metal fence over there by the outhouse that just *called * to a gaggle of girls. We had no idea what the single line of metal wire meant, or absorbed the Live Wire Do Not Touch sign.
“What does that mean?”
“I dunno.”
“You touch it…” and so fourth.
For some reason that is still alien to me, I went first and I touched it,. I just remember reaching out innocently enough and suddenly, with a power of it’s own, my arm windmilled behind my body. It was tingly for a while after that.
Lessons Learned:
Never volunteer.
Live Wire Do Not Touch means exactly that.
I was ten, it was summer vacation and the phone rings. My mom asks me if I can put the pot roast in the oven at 3pm at 375 degrees. “Sure”, I say and that was that. I’ve always been good at following instructions and I did exactly what she told me. I took the pot roast out of the fridge stuck it in the oven at 3pm and turned on the oven to 375 degrees. Nowhere in her instructions did it say to remove the Saran Wrap or put the pot roast in a pan. She was more specific after that.
I was four. We had a litter of black and tan hound dog puppies that I thought would be a lot prettier if they were completely black. My dad had a big bucket of oil from the tractor sitting in the barn. Black oil=black puppy paint. Luckily, my mom caught me just as I moved from using an old paintbrush to just simply dunking the entire puppy in the bucket.
When I was a bit older, I decided it was a good idea to have Cat Olympics in my backyard. Cats do not like being placed on top of the swingset/“balance beam”. Nor do they appreciate being pushed into the cows’ water trough for swimming laps. And they absolutely will not race on command. Needless to say, the Cat Olympics were a huge disaster.
It’s a wonder that any of my pets survived my childhood.