At Kennedy Space Center

The center of our whole wild, ungainly, homeschool road trip field trip is Kennedy Space Center. I've been fascinated with the space shuttle since I was a small child, and it's a dream of mine to watch a space shuttle launch.

We think that we have a lifetime to make our dreams come true, and so it was with a gasp that I suddenly realized, very early this year, that this end to the space shuttle program that I've been reading about? This marks a deadline to my dream!

If I don't watch this space shuttle launch now, in April, or this summer, in June, then I will never in my entire life watch a space shuttle launch--it will forever be something that I simply haven't done.

Well, I didn't give up a PhD in English and a full-time career and keep my wonderful children out of institutions of formal schooling to simply pass up opportunities, to simply let dreams die, unfulfilled. Why, out of the many thousands of reasons that I could give you for being a stay-at-home homeschooling mom, I'd tell you that among the most important is the ability to choose from a vastly larger bounty of opportunities simply not available to those who spend their days in the daily grind, and to have the time, the mindset, the focus, and, yep, the opportunity to fulfill our dreams. By "our" dreams, I'm in the habit of mostly meaning the children's dreams, of course, but you know what? My dreams are important, too.

Can you say "homeschool field trip?" Yes, as a matter of fact, I believe that you can.

Fortunately, Matt was able to pretty much leave the jury room and hop right into the first part of our field trip with us, and thus he was able to help out with the baby wrangling at our visit to the Kennedy Space Center, where I was afraid that the girls would be bored and whiny and need wrangling so that I could sightsee.

Actually, once they got it into their little heads that, unlike Indiana, it is simply hot here, and nope, there's nothing to do about it, and yep, you do have to wear your hat and your sunglasses even if you don't want to, and while you're over here trying to hand them off to me why don't we rub some more sunblock on you, they both enjoyed themselves quite a bit and didn't need much wrangling, and we all got to happily sightsee:

Loving on the Astronaut

Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)

Those grey vertical lines on the left side are big garage doors that open up to let rockets and the shuttle through.

It's a BIG building

The Crawler Transporter!

It is SUCH a rare treat to see this out and about! This is the gigantic piece of equipment that the shuttle, solid rocket boosters, and external fuel tank sit on as they're driven, soooooo slowly, out to Launch Pad 39A. You would only ever see the crawler transporter hanging out by the launch gantry if....

Space Shuttle Endeavor is Waiting for Launch

My nerd heart beat with joy at this sight.

I might have even squealed.

All that equipment that conceals the shuttle, the solid rocket boosters, and the external tank will be rolled away as lift-off nears, but it's necessary to have until then to allow access to the exterior of all the equipment. Tragically, a worker actually fell off of this equipment back in March, in a horrible accident, but accidents like that are extremely rare.

Matt was a good sport, but the vehicles for space travel aren't really his thing like they are mine, so he got to take every single...

Nerd Portrait

He likes the Apollo stuff a lot, however--I think there were a lot of comic books that revolved around the Apollo program?

Apollo Spacecraft with Matt and Girls

There was a fabulous shuttle launch simulator which everyone except for short little Sydney could ride, displays of the actually Mercury Mission Control and the Apollo Mission Control, and a full-size walk-in model space shuttle:

Looking up at Mirrored Cargo Bay Doors in Model Shuttle

Heat Tiles on Bottom of Model Shuttle

See how they're all labeled? They actually do look like that on the real shuttle, too. Each one is made for a particular spot on the shuttle, and labelled so that they can all be assembled correctly.

Can you see us standing under the full-size model of the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank?

Upcoming Event--next week!

Rocket Garden

Plenty Roomy in This Capsule--perhaps they should have just sent children?

Which brings me, finally, to the rocket that Willow has declared is her favorite:

Mercury Redstone

It's the rocket that sent the Mercury missions into space. 

Parenting a little girl who has a favorite rocket--that's another dream come true, now that I think about it.

On Daytona Beach

We're having a week of leisure in Daytona Beach, Florida, this week. Even Matt is here with us on a nearly unprecedented use of his vacation days (next year's homecoming logo won't design itself, after all), which has given us ample time to discuss and process and discuss again his jury experience.

All of my library guidebooks noted that Daytona Beach is a little...um...seedy?...and I will tell you first of all that, in my opinion, this is true. People can drive their cars right onto the beach (and oh, they do!), and people are apparently permitted to smoke EVERYWHERE (and oh, they do!).

However, our room is nice and overlooks the beach and costs something like $40 a night, the two pools are nice, and the ability to walk across the patio and open the child-proof gate and step right onto the beach is very, very nice, and has made us very, very happy here this week:

 
 
 
 
 
 
Also this week, we're going to visit Kennedy Space Center a couple of times and spend a morning at a big-ass flea market (squee!), and then the girls and I are going to send Matt back home on a cheap-o one-way flight on Southwest, because we're going to be headed across the peninsula for a few days to study seashells, but we've got to be back on the Space Coast by Friday!

The launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor won't watch itself, after all.

Where in the World are We?

At the beach, of course!

Colorful Eggs for Easter

Out of all the various projects that we do, some of which are SO elaborate (the cookie Solar System got made again this week!), often it's the simplest that are just right for the moment, as with the happy morning that the little girls spent dyeing Easter eggs:

 
 
 
 
 
Just vinegar, food coloring, and warm water--why don't we do this for EVERY holiday?

Hot-Process Soap Success

I let my first batch of hot-process soap cure for a couple of weeks, just to be on the safe side since it was my first batch. We've all had a chance to try it out at the sink and in the shower by now, however, and the decision is unanimous....

We love it!!!

 
It's quite a bit softer than I thought it would be--I don't know if that's because it could stand to be cured for a while longer, or because of my recipe. Even going through the soap at a bar a week, though, each homemade bar is still cheaper than the cheapest soap at the store, and the ingredients are completely natural, AND it smells delightfully of cinnamon and geranium essential oils, with just a touch of lavender.

In other news, Matt has been gone for most of the week as part of the jury for a high-profile local trial, the murder of an IU assistant professor. It was hard, and upsetting, and stressful, both for Matt to be there and for me to be at home and not know when he's coming home, and to hear people on both sides trash-talking what the jury would supposedly do and think. The jury deliberated for twelve hours, they did their job well and returned a fair verdict, and then they went home to their worried families. Thank goodness it's over.

Pin on a Pro-Breastfeeding Pinback

Not that I think that there is anybody who is specifically ANTI-breastfeeding, necessarily (although I do think that there are definitely people whose ideas about breastfeeding, particularly their ideas about when and where and how one should or should not breastfeed, make them, for all intents and purposes, anti-breastfeeding), so I guess these International Breastfeeding Symbol pinbacks, up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, are more of a "Yay, breastfeeding!" stance than a political statement:

 
 
 
I didn't take nearly enough photographs of my own nursing babes, primarily because I'm the one who holds the camera, I suppose, but here's one of little toddler Will having herself some nursies:

Those were some precious times.

Homeschool Science: Put Some Color in a Carnation

Keeping a celery stalk in a glass of colored water was fun enough, but if something is worth doing, then it is absolutely worth over-doing--all in the name of science, of course!

On the way home from a playdate the other day, the girls and I stopped by the grocery store and bought ourselves a small bouquet of white carnations. To home, where I filled more Mason jars up with water and let the girls play another few rounds of color mixing math, and then we trimmed the carnations and popped them in, each carnation in its own jar of colored water:

 Although it takes just hours to begin to see the color change in the leafy celery, we lived with these carnations on the living room table for WEEKS! In a few days, you can see that the xylem have pulled the colored water out to the tips of the carnation's petals:

 
 
 If you can live long enough with your increasingly pitiful-looking cut carnations, however--

--they'll eventually become much more dramatically tinted:

 

The girls loved checking on their carnations several times a day, often plucking a single petal off of one to examine at greater detail with our portable microscope.

I must admit, however, in all honesty, that my absolute favorite part of this experiment was eventually, FINALLY, dumping out the colored carnations onto the compost heap and washing the jars out. When we move houses one day, it's become my dream to have a dedicated schoolroom, a place where ten carnations in jars of colored water can sit happily for six weeks and grow ever more dead and pitiful and not be in anybody's way.