Birthing

After many months of waiting around uneventfully my curiosity got the best of me.  I decided to see if I could "candle" the eggs and see if they were indeed fertilized.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it's holding an egg between yourself and a candle, allowing some light to penetrate the shell and give you a little insight as to what's going on inside.  The date was August 3rd, which was nearing in on the projected hatching date.  I'll admit, I was skeptical.  Could we be wasting our time with unfertilized eggs, as was insinuated by our friends?  Could we be incapable of properly incubating eggs?  After lots of heckling I decided candling an egg would be the best option.  I brought the egg into the bathroom, being careful not to turn it and eclipsed the light of a candle with it.  Veins.  Lots of veins.  No discernible smell of rot either.  My hopes rise.  But just as quickly as my hopes rise, the blood runs out of my face in fear.  As I'm placing the egg carefully back into the Rubbermaid container, it bursts.  I try not to panic and use a couple of pairs of tweezers to open the egg enough so that if the turtle who was in there was still alive he would have air to breathe.  No motion for 3 minutes that felt like 3 weeks.  I used the tweezers and began to gently pull the egg apart.  Then suddenly a head comes flying out of the dark mass toward me and begins breathing.  I leave him alone for a day and come back to find him trying to push his way out of the shell remnants, so I give him a little help.  As I'm doing so I notice the other 2 eggs have slits in the top and they're all trying to make their way out.  At this point I prepare a 10 gallon fish tank for our new arrivals.  Information on that to come.