Getting Centered

ZEN RETREAT: Know a really lovely way to spend a lunch hour? Go to a garden center! That's what we did between the kids' math and science classes today. During our pleasant perusing, we spied a number of yoga frogs. The pair above  was adjacent to a concrete bench, so I had to have the kids attempt to recreate the scene.

Yesterday's mail brought "junior gardener" newsletters from Sky Nursery. It's right by the school the kids attend in Shoreline on Wednesdays, so we visited the nursery today. The newsletter included a coupon good for a free pack of poppy seeds in March, and so we went to pick those up (noting, at the time, it's IMPOSSIBLE to think the word 'poppies' without hearing the Wicked Witch of the West's voice. ...

Hopefully CJ and Annabelle's poppies will be of the friendly, non-narcotic variety. ;)

Today, they test drove a variety of expensive outdoor furniture. ... 

 
We stopped by the Jr. Gardeners' desk. 

Annabelle spent some time coloring.

Meanwhile, CJ and I checked out the nearby groundcoverings, including many "Stepables."  We agreed that we really didn't like the name of this one ... 

it conjures up creepy images of babies crying when you step on the plants. Ewwww.

FLY BY: After the nursery, we hustled back to school so we had a few minutes to check in on an asteroid in the neighborhood. Specifically, asteroid 2014 DX110. 

We checked coverage on both live.slooh.com and space.com.  It was fun watching the 100-foot rock hurtling through not-too-distant space.  In fact, the asteroid was closer to Earth than is our own moon!

We told the kids' science teacher about it, and as class started, she put the traveling asteroid up on the big white board, and led a discussion about what types of material it might be made up of, which was very apropos, given the kids just finished a unit about geology last week. 

While we were watching, it made its closest approach to Earth, about 217,000 miles (350,000 kilometers) away.