I'm a Rocket, Man

ENTER THE ARES ERA: Last night while we slept, a new age in space exploration was being born. NASA's experimental rocket Ares I-X was hauled to its launch pad. The four-mile trip took more than seven hours. At 327 feet, Ares I-X is taller than the Statue of Liberty. This is the first time in 34 years that a rocket other than the Space Shuttle has stood at Launch Pad 39-B. Ares rockets are designed to carry astronauts to the moon someday - if funding isn't cut. Ares I-X is a two-stage launcher with a five-segment solid rocket booster first stage and a liquid-fueled second stage. The Orion crew capsule and a launch abort system sit atop the rockets.

According to Space.com, the Ares I-X test rocket has three chances to launch next week, one a day each between Oct. 27 and Oct. 29. We'll certainly be watching!

Of course we went to NASA's Web site to get the scoop on Ares, and watched the video "A New Rocket is Born." It's a highly accelerated record of Ares' construction and assembly. On NASA's site we also found instructions for building our own Ares model out of cans. I think we'll do that between now and launch date. We also watched a slide show of the construction, some launch pad shots and artists' renderings of what Ares will look like in flight.

Because of the rocket news today, as the kids were doing math and language arts worksheets, I played some far out music, including Elton John's stellar Rocket Man (using a YouTube video that includes some great old NASA footage). The kids know this song well, and sang along. Bowie's Space Oddity (Ground Control to Major Tom) was another obvious/must. It's from 1969, which means it's FORTY friggin' years old. How is that possible? Seriously.

POP ARTISTS: For a creativity fix today, Pop Tarts fans CJ and Annabelle logged on to poptarts.com/popartist. We'd seen a promo on a box where you could design a custom Pop Tart t-shirt, and the kids were excited about the prospect. On the site they were able to drag and drop graphics, resize and rotate them. It was interesting watching the kids' different approaches. Annabelle wanted to fill-and-color up every square inch of her "canvas," while CJ had a more minimalist approach. I thought it was interesting how he took a Pop Tart and blew it up so that it's squiggled frosting appeared as stripes on his shirt front. He then used only chocolate chip cookies (which will surprise no one who knows him) repeatedly on the stripes.

PETER PETER REVISITED: From time to time, CJ brings up the injustice of the whole Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater situation. It Really Bothers Him. In fact, just Sunday he was saying how he figured Peter Peter and his wife would never have babies because of how Peter treated her. I had to agree with him. Naturally, this a.m. when I saw a headline about a pumpkin house in West Sussex, England, on the Internet, I had to check it out and show the kids. We decided that if Peter Peter put his wife in this house, it might, indeed, be keeping her very well.

COTTAGE INDUSTRY: Shortly after viewing the pumpkin house video, CJ asked, "What does 'cottage' mean, Annabelle?" (I'm guessing perhaps the word cottage was used in the video.) Annabelle replied, "It's a very little house." At that very moment, she happened to be crafting a cottage out of a box, a fact she pointed out to CJ. "It's good to recycle stuff," she explained.

BOOKWORMS: We read three books today. One, Move, was about the different way animals move. The fabric collages were cool, but the text was almost too young for my kids. Hooray for Reading Day! was age appropriate. It was about a first grader who gets embarrassed when she has to read aloud to her class because she makes mistakes. However, through practice she overcomes her fears. We also read The Bears Autumn by Keizaburo Tejima. It is a gorgeous book with woodcut illustrations (which gave us a chance to talk about that artform). It also melded some past units we've had nicely, as it was about salmon and autumn.

TURKEY TROT: Before heading out for yoga, we took Kirby for a walk. Along the way, Annabelle and I collected some longish pine cones we think would make great turkey feathers with a just-right squash of some kind. I hope we can find that squash ...

POLAR PROWL: At bedtime the kids watched one of the DVDs we got at the library recently: Really Wild Animals, a National Geographic production. The video had info about polar bears, walruses, penguins and killer whales, as well as info about geography and cartography. A nice way to close out the day at MPA.