The Lost Weekend

The weekend after my Grandmother's funeral services, we hung out "up north" and saw some family. I was going back through our pictures and I do NOT remember this weekend. At all. I think I was just exhausted. It was the first weekend in October, but the kids are wearing shorts...so it must have been pretty warm! The pictures are pretty...wish I remembered more of our visit!

Stomp.

We had such a beautiful week last week and we tried to spend as much of it as possible OUTSIDE! We invited Ian, Julia, and AJ (and their mom) over one afternoon to play with Colin's new stomp rockets.

A demonstration:




Fun, right?

We were waiting for our friends.


And then more fun!




AJ was off exploring and wasn't too interested in the rockets! The big kids played for a while and then started a nice game of hide and seek! Then we came inside to check out all the birthday presents! Fun visit!

Princess Party on the Moon

Yesterday the kids wanted to build sandcastles in our sandbox. And then Colin decided to make water towers. So, we ended up with two princess castles and two water towers. Castles in the rear, towers in the front.

Gillian told us there were three princesses in the two castles, which sounded like trouble to me. Then Colin discovered an old nerf rocket thing and turned it into "blast off rocket to the moon." He kept telling us that the princesses were on the rockets and they were going to a party on the moon. Too funny. BUT, Gillian was not pleased. She kept telling him that the princesses DID NOT want to go to the moon. It was too scary. She probably got that idea from me since I always tell Colin that I'd rather not go to the moon with him in his rocket because I don't like space. Anyway, we settled things by them each getting their "own" set of pretend princesses. Some to rocket and some to stay in the castles. Oh boy.

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.