Rockets! Blastin' Into Space!

Lately the kids have been gaga over rockets. I'll admit to encouraging them a little bit in this. I'm not quite sure how they started to get interested, but I know what kicked it into high gear: Discovery. So, on the evening that the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off for its last mission, they had the clip on the nightly news. I happened to see this on the news, and recorded it because I thought that the kids might like it. It turns out that they loved it.

Seeing how much they liked it, we went on YouTube and found out that NASA TV has a very large number of clips there... including video of the whole 9 minutes from lift-off to orbit. Since the TiVo can play YouTube videos, we put the launch video up on the TV.

They liked this even better than the short clip from the news. We've watched this video probably like 30 times. "Watch Rockets Blastin' Off on Me TV!" is cry frequently heard around the house. In fact, Gillian tells us that she's been dreaming about rockets... well rockets blastin' off on her TV.

I have several large "coffee table" books about space, rockets, and photographs taken by astronauts while in space. We've started having to look at these books at bed time along with Elmer, Trixie, and other bed time favorites. Then they found To Space and Back.

Now, To Space and Back is part of our nightly routine. We look at the pictures, have a little count down (though theirs is a count up, not a count down), talk about how some of the astronauts are floating right side up and some are upside down, how they're drinking their balls of orange juice, and how the space shuttle comes back down like an airplane.

We've also had to move up from real space ships to imaginary ones. Grammy Lynn (I think) bought them some little Star Wars books at some point and one of them is called Star Wars Spaceships. We have to read this a lot too, and now they've become pretty good identifying their Star Wars spaceships...

So, here's to hoping that they keep their love of rockets and go on to become good little astronauts or aerospace engineers.