Tardy

photo credit - NASA/Bill Ingalls

LATE: This didn't get published last night per usual, as Blogger wouldn't let me save or publish anything then. Fortunately, they got the bug(s) worked out overnight.

AGE OF AQUARIUS: There's nothing like a rocket launch for breakfast! This morning NASA launched a Delta II rocket with the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft payload from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. A joint mission with Argentina, the rocket carried a satellite which will map the salinity at the ocean surface. The info gleaned will be used to improving understanding of two major components of Earth's climate system: the water cycle and ocean circulation.

Naturally, I had to play The Fifth Dimension's "Age of Aquarius" for the kids while we were looking at photos of Aquarius and watching launch footage. They boogied down. CJ was impressed with the video's special effects (The Fifth Dimension floating in space on an upside down pie tin) given the video's age (1969).

NASA has a wonderful Web section dedicated to Aquarius. It even has a "What's Your Salt IQ" quiz that's very educational. Turns out my saltwater IQ isn't that great ... though it is a bit better after taking the quiz.

GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME: We spent about 2 hours outside today, trying to tame the lawn. For such a small lot it's a lot of trouble (get it, get it? a LOT of trouble!) because it's a steep hillside and there are so many mature trees - not to mention weeds and fast-growing invasives like blackberries and ivy. While I whacked and hacked, the kids mostly played. Not sure what the game was here, but looks like CJ caught a live one.
Our lettuce is doing so well, I think we might have to thin it again. That, or CJ and Annabelle can just eat some more of the young plants.HIT THE BARS: While Annabelle was in ballet today, CJ was working on the monkey bars. He still hasn't made it all the way across, but he's more than halfway there. Here, he shows me his blisters. ...
No, I couldn't see them either. ;)

Expo a Go-Go

COOKIES AND CREAM: While countless Americans were sitting in morning rush hour traffic, we were slathering sugar on cupcakes with our own deadline to meet. This evening there was an "Expo" at the kids' school and they declared yesterday around 2-ish that they wanted to go. Super!

The Expo is bring food, make a display out of a project you've been working on and watch some presentations/performances. Sounds simple enough, and it is, if you're willing to buy a bag of Doritos and store bought brownies as a snack, but we had other ideas.

Annabelle really wanted to make some "Hello, Cupcake!" inspired flower cupcakes. She wanted two different kinds - some sunflowereque ones with Oreo centers and some more daisy like ones with Nilla Wafers in the middle. OK ...
Annabelle was in charge of putting the cookies in the middle of the cupcakes/flowers.
CJ and Annabelle both helped mix the coloring into the frosting.

And CJ had his first go-round with filling a pastry/icing bag. He also did some piping. He was nervous at first, telling me he was afraid of making a mistake. I told him the nice thing about mistakes involving frosting is that he could eat them. He felt better. :)
And here are the white ones Bee requested. ...

ON DISPLAY: We also had to put together displays for each of the kids. Fortunately, we didn't have to make projects - they both had more than a couple of options.

Annabelle decided to share her (now petrified) Sesame Peeps. We had to get the Peeps out of storage and check them out. She had to make a new Sesame Peeps sign for her streetlight. She pained a bit over cutting it out.

And she had to a little touch up gluing. She attached the newspaper story announcing her big contest win to a presentation board and Boom! - instant display. CJ's took a little more work. He wanted to display his Lolly book. That meant mounting 11 photos, making a title, adding page numbers and an explanation. He really enjoyed the power of the paper cutter! CJ was very proud of his display. At the event, he rounded up and welcomed people to his station to share his story. :) You can barely see CJ in this pic (the khaki colored legs next to Annabelle). He's pointing out the finer points of his project to three young ladies. :)

Who's There?

KNOCK KNOCK: I'm not sure what time it was when you heard your first "Knock Knock" joke of the day, but I can tell you with all certainly the first one I heard was at 6:48 a.m.. And it went like this:

CJ: "Knock knock!"
Me: "Who's there?"
CJ: "Why do owls go?"
Me" "Why do owls go who?"
CJ: "Because that's how they talk, silly! Get it? Get it?!"

FINAL WORD: The kids got their science finals back today. They each missed one question, earning 93 percent, so an A for each of them. Hooray! (And no, I am NOT counting the last true-or-false question, "Rocks are amazing things!" as a miss for CJ. As he pointed out last week, "That's an opinion question." The kids did a little clean up in class today, stripping their binders and gathering up months' worth of odds and ends. As a parting gift, the teacher let the kids each select a rock and a couple of googly eyes and Voila! instant Pet Rock.It was very nice of her and the kids loved it.

In class, they played a few rounds of Bingo! On their scorecards were vocab words from each of the three units they completed this year (wood, balance & motion, and rocks & soil). As luck would have it, CJ was the first to get a Bingo!

BOOK 'EM: In our inbox at school today was a hot-off-the-presses version of their Shoreline school's yearbook. Sweet! An older student headed up the project and she did a nice job. And so here you have it, CJ & Annabelle's very first yearbook photos. They are, as one would expect, not great. That's a yearbook tradition right? In my/their defense, we'd just come in out of a rainstorm, and were not expecting a portrait session ...
Next year, we'll mix in a comb. Probably. With enough notice. ;)

M&MATH: Tomorrow night there's an end of year celebration at the school. We're going to make some treats to take and we needed red M&Ms as one ingredient. You know what that meant - buying a couple of bags and doing some sorting by color. But before we started counting, I asked the kids to make some predictions. Which color would they have the most of? The least? How many total would they have?

Then they got to counting. (Do you like their jaunty Dollar Store hats?)
I had the kids count by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, and 10s. They liked the 4s the least. It was better math practice than I thought it would be, as instead of just routine counting, we were talking about it as multiples of the number.

And because I know you're just dying to know, CJ's bag had 396 M&Ms. Annabelle's had 402. I told CJ he was ripped off and he should write corporate tomorrow. ;) CJ had the most orange (79) and the fewest brown and yellow (58 each). Annabelle had the most orange, also (93), and the fewest brown (41).

In the end, we got enough red ones (109 between the two of them) for our project. Tomorrow will definitely be an artsy craftsy day!

Meanwhile, at the Cosmodrome ...

WALK THE DOG: I forgot to report yesterday that the kids took a step toward independence. For the second time ever, CJ suggested he take the dog for a walk around the block. I both love and hate this idea.

I love it because he's showing a desire for some responsibility and independence, which is great, but I hate it because it means he is out of my sight and on the mean streets of Magnolia for an eternal 60 seconds or so.

Yesterday, CJ did a loop to the north and lived to tell about it (phew). In fact, he was feeling pretty saucy, and suggested a loop to the south. This time Annabelle insisted upon accompanying him, which made me twice as nervous. Despite that, I sent the three of them off (gulp), and then snuck down the alley about 50 feet behind them, and once they hit the end of the block, I flat out ran back down the alley, tore up the three dozen stairs from the bottom of our lot to the top, and met them at the gate (panting). I do believe Christian thought I was crazy.

Have I mentioned I don't like them striking out on their own yet?

MR. CURRICULUM: CJ had schooling on his mind this morning. Before 7 a.m. he was pitching an idea that his music teacher should use "Classroom Connection" to market her class to people not in it already. Next up, he suggested that his yoga class adopt a "world of animals" marathon. I told him that sounded great and he could share that thought with his yoga teacher this afternoon.

Then, he weighed in that he likes science, "except the times when I have to get my hands dirty and get dirt under my fingernails. Those are the worst." Poor Mr. Tactile Sensitive. I told him that there are many kinds of science, and most of them absolutely do not require getting your hands dirty. And really, there's no reason that he couldn't be wearing gloves for some of the stuff they do. I can't think of a single experiment/exercise in science they had where his wearing gloves would have been a detriment. I'll have to remember that in the future.

RUSSIAN ROCKET FIRE: All morning and early afternoon, we had NASA TV on, so we could watch the launch of Expedition 28, a launch of a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On board were NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawam and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov - who represents the first second-generation astronaut (his father was also a cosmonaut who reached space).

The launch was set for 1:12 p.m. Seattle time (just after 2 in the morning Kazakhstan time). The NASA announcer informed is this type of launch vehicle (Soyuz) been used in various configurations since 1963. Wow. And here I was thinking the space shuttles were old-ish.NASA TV showed the dramatic blast off, and I was also surprised there was a real time cockpit camera for the launch - something I don't recall seeing on shuttle launches I've seen. I noticed a stuffed pig hanging above cosmonaut Volkov (his son had given it to him) and pointed it out to the kids. I asked, "Have they left the Earth's atmosphere yet?" They both replied "No!" I asked how they knew how and they both said because if the capsule had, the pig would be floating. Excellent! I was also pleased that Annabelle asked what types of experiments or new equipment Expedition 28 had on board. :)

Fossum, Furukawa and Volkov are scheduled to dock their spacecraft with the ISS on Thursday afternoon, where they'll join Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev of the Russian space agency and Ron Garan of NASA.

Speaking of Garan ...

DISCOVERY OF THE DAY: I was poking around the NASA Web site today, reading bios about the NASA astronauts on board the ISS right now, including Ron Garan. I followed one link after another and eventually found myself on a Web site called Fragile Oasis. Turns out it's an organization founded by Garan, "established to unite in the common goal of sharing our humanity and improving our world. Let us inspire, recognize, and help each other in our collective quest to make life better on our planet."

Garan's a good writer. The Fragile Oasis Web site is definitely worth checking out. He'd posted his first ever video blog from the ISS and I was rather mortified to see that NO ONE had commented on it yet. Well, now one person has. :)

LOSERS: Doing music homework is part of our Tuesday routine. Um ... except for today. I couldn't find the homework list. It wasn't in Annabelle's folder. It wasn't in CJ's folder. It wasn't on our homework-y thingees bookshelf (which I recently, eh hem, cleaned and reorganized).

So, the kids went homeworkless to music. Embarrassing. I told the kids to let their teacher know I'd misplaced the assignments. :/ Their last week of "Young Musicians" is next Tuesday.

FINISHED: CJ finished reading the "Great Illustrated Classics: The Wizard of Oz." I asked CJ what he thought about it. His review: "In all there were 22 chapters, and each one of them has lots of pages but Chapter 22 only has one. I would give a 10 out of 10 - a great book!"

Not bad at all. To date, unless it is of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series, he's been mostly "meh" about books - especially chapter books.

THE CLAW: Thanks to a SpongeBob episode "Skill Crane," where Squidward tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to snag a toy out of one of those &%*^ claw machines, CJ began obsessing about said machines. He and Annabelle are constantly begging me to underwrite their attempts on the machines, and I am constantly saying NO because the things are rigged so that you don't win. That said, I told him, "I'm sure there are videos on YouTube telling you how to beat those machines. Sure 'nuff, we found a couple. The first one we watched was by a group called Brainiac and titled "Funfair Physics" which sounded cool enough. I liked their approach.

We watched another video, this one from the Howcast series, that was less science based, more focused on grab-the-prize techniques.

GOING APE: Realizing it's been waaaaay too long since we've done a formal art lesson, I cued up Activity TV and since Donkey Kong has been on our brains in a big way, I chose a cartooning lesson about how to draw an ape.They were both very pleased with their final drawings, which is awesome. Guess whose ape is the pink one?

FEED THE CHILDREN: I gave the kids some rice at lunch time and for "fun" I gave them chopsticks to eat with. They were nonplussed. Annabelle had a small measure of success, but CJ wasn't having it - literally! The poor boy was starving. "Screw these chopsticks!" he declared. :0 I gave him a fork and a Look.

The Monday After

GAMERS' PARADISE: On Saturday and Sunday, we headed to Seattle Center for the fantastic Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show. We'd never been before, and weren't sure what to expect. Boy oh boy, were we happily surprised. There were over 350 pinball and arcade games to play for free - after paying admission at the door.

Saturday afternoon where were a lot of people there, but there was never much of a wait to play a particular game.

At 2 p.m. we ceased playing to attend a seminar by guest speaker Steve Wiebe, who was profiled in the documentary "King of Kong." Wiebe is a past DK world record holder and hopes to capture his title back this summer, when he's not teaching math at a Seattle area middle school (his "day job").

CJ and Christian had met Mr. Wiebe before, at a local fundraiser. After that meeting, CJ decided he heeded to buy a present for Mr. Wiebe and found a vintage stuffed Donkey Kong on eBay and bought it for him months ago. Saturday, he would finally have a chance to give it to him. Of course, Christian and I asked CJ "Are you sure? Are you sure?" about a dozen times. He insisted he was.

When we ran into Steve Wiebe in the hallway before the seminar, CJ asked Mr. Wiebe if he wanted the Donkey Kong. I was surprised that he didn't already have one, frankly. I mean, he's the King of Kong! Of course, Mr. Wiebe asked CJ multiple times if he was sure and CJ said he was.
After the DK handoff, we sat in on Wiebe's "Donkey Kong 101" class and gained some valuable pointers about playing the game and racking up points.

Afterward, the kids posed with Mr. Wiebe for a photo. And tonight Steve sent Christian a message via Facebook, saying, "It was great seeing you and CJ at the show. Please tell CJ thank you for the stuffed Donkey Kong. It was very generous and it will be displayed in my classroom with my other Donkey Kong items. I hope you enjoyed your weekend and hope to see you at next year's show or another event in the future. Thanks again, Steve." Very nice. :) Then, we went back to the show floor and played LOTS more games. And after that we definitely wanted to take advantage of the sunniest Saturday so far this year, so we hit the water features at Seattle Center.
Sunday morning, we went back for more. There were fewer people at the show, which made it even easier to navigate and machine hop. CJ's favorite new-to-him game was Donkey Kong II, a fan/non-Nintendo made arcade game that was so soooooooooo hard. (Even Steve Wiebe mentioned it and said how darn difficult it was during his presentation.)Sunday afternoon CJ managed to clear the game's first level. I don't think a whole lot of people had done that because when CJ did it a small crowd gathered behind him to see what the second level looked like.

Repeating history, we hit the fountain again after the show.

BACK TO REALITY: Today, we didn't leave the house at all. We had to pay the price for playing all weekend, so Christian and I were busy doing things like pulling weeds, building and painting stair railings, sprucing up a screen door and installing trim on the siding. When she heard we'd be doing some sanding, Annabelle asked to help, noting, "I learned all about sandpaper in my science class!" We also thinned our burgeoning lettuce garden - moving about half of it to another raised bed. We mixed in the Safeco Field soil ... I wonder if our garden will grow peanuts and Cracker Jacks! I am happy to report that this afternoon CJ came up to me and asked if he could try some of our lettuce that's growing. That request was met with an enthusiastic "YES!!!"
He plucked off and chewed a couple of the tiny leaves, and about five minutes later he came back and said, "That was so good, can I have some more?" Let's hope this is part of a new, veggie loving trend!

We did also do some good old fashioned school work today, including a longish math assignment. Neither one of the kids found it particularly challenging, as you can tell by Annabelle's editorializing doodles ..