Slip Slidin' Away

AAAH: CJ's first utterance this morning upon heading downstairs - "Ah, I think I'll have a massage with breakfast. Yeah." And so he sat in the portable shiatsu chair, enjoying his Lucky Charms and watching cartoons. Not a bad way to start a Friday. Or any day, for that matter.

COMPOSE YOURSELF: This morning at Musikgarten CJ and Annabelle tried their hands at composing. For weeks now they've been working with the musical staff and the concepts of timing and pitch. Today, one of their exercises was to place six notes on a musical staff and then be able to sing both tonally and for timing, with the four notes being paired together as eight notes (they weren't called eighth notes, mind you, it was just explained when notes have a bar connecting them, they're not as long in duration).

Pictured above, CJ's composition is on top; Bee's is on the bottom.

ROCKET FIRE!: As soon as the kids got home from Musikgarten, we tuned our attentions toward the space race. Specifically, toward the Internet site of SpaceX to watch the inaugural launch of Falcon 9.

Who is SpaceX, you ask? I only learned about them yesterday, when I happened to spy a Yahoo! news story about them and their upcoming rocket launch. (The story was an interesting read, outlining the pros and cons of the privatization of space launches and the understandably hard feelings 9,000 NASA shuttle program employees looking at looming lay offs.)

They're a private company, and arguably the leading entity to take over where the space shuttle program left off after the last NASA shuttle launch (a few short months from now).

The first countdown was held at just 2 seconds to lift off due to an automatic shutdown of the ignition system (don't know why at this point). However, about an hour later, they reset the countdown clock to 15 minutes, it started ticking away and then rocket fire, baby! The kids started cheering. It took me right back to the Causeway, watching the launch of space shuttle Atlantis. We watched Falcon 9 until it achieved orbit. (You can see highlights on the SpaceX Web site.)

Of today's launch, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "Congratulations to SpaceX on today's launch of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. SpaceX's accomplishment is an important milestone in the commercial transportation effort and puts the company a step closer to providing cargo services to the International Space Station."

Following the launch, jubilant SpaceX founder Elon Musk said, "This has really been a fantastic day." Multimillionare Musk used part of the fortune he made from selling his brainchild PayPal to fund the start of SpaceX.

Musk believes Friday's launch bolsters President Barack Obama's plan to give private companies the job of ferrying cargo and ultimately people to the space station, freeing up NASA to aim for true outer space, saying, "This is the dawn of a new era in space exploration, I think a very exciting era and one which I think will lead to the democratization of space, making space accessible to everyone eventually."

I'm so happy the kids and I got to see the historic moment unfold live. "We wouldn't get to see this if we didn't go to homeschool," Annabelle observed during the excitement. (Falcon 9 lift off photo copyright SpaceX, from their great photo gallery.)

LOVELY LUNCH: Early afternoon we had guests - Grandma and Grandpa from Vancouver USA! They came bearing gifts. Annabelle has already had hours of fun with her Polly Pockets motorhome playset, and tonight we gave CJ's electronic 20 questions game a test drive.

For lunch, we went to the wonderfully-located Maggie Bluff's, along the north shore of Elliott Bay, just west of the Port of Seattle's Terminal 91 (a frequent jogging/biking destination of ours). It's *the* spot to be on a sunny day, but even on those gray afternoon, the place was bustling.

MEMORIES: We're still plugging away on scrapbook pieces. I've finally divided the 300(!) or so photos into categories and put them in some sort of order. I still need the kids' written memories to go along with the major events. Today's topic was our visit to Kennedy Space Center. I spread the KSC photos out in front of the kids and asked them to write 3 or so sentences about their favorite or most memorable parts. I'd love to think by next week we might have more than a cover done for our book ...

FRIDAY GLIDE: You know how MPA loves free stuff, so when we heard that there was a free ice skating session at Key Arena today, you know we just had to be there!The ice was in place due to the recent "Stars on Ice" event at the arena. That's right - we were tripping around on the same sheet of frozen water as Olympic medalists - woo hoo!

Honestly, it was just a little CrAzy for me to take both kids ice skating by myself. I haven't been skating in, hmm, well, around 20 years - maybe 25? And the kids have only been once before and it was semi disastrous for them. ;) But it was free, so we HAD to go!

Within 1/4 lap around the rink, we were all rethinking this ice skating thing. My right ankle was ranging from unbearable to intolerable on the pain scale (my skates loaner were horribly ill fitting - men's hockey skates, I think, with way too much lateral wobble). Even though he was using one of those "I'm handicapped" looking skater's helpers, CJ was digging NO part of it and Annabelle looked like she was on a Slip-n-Slide rather than ice skating (propel self forward, fall, slide, stagger to feet, repeat process).

But somehow, some way we slogged our way through 40 minutes of it. I never did fall, and neither did CJ. Poor Bee fell too many times to count, but she always got up and kept going. By the last 10 minutes she wasn't clinging to me or the wall, either. And when I saw a poor young lad curled up in the fetal position on the ice, I insisted that CJ give his 'walker' up to the boy (my god was the kid's mother grateful). And though he was unsteady, CJ did an admirable job without it. I was very proud of both of them.

There was one casualty - Annabelle's ill fitting skates gave her a blister on the heel. :( "Even though I got a blister, I just hanged in there," she points out.

Sorry for the crappy, blurry ice skating pix. They were taken by my crappy, blurry camera phone in low lighting and I was moving, trying not to fall down/get run over and the kids were moving/trying not to fall down.