(no subject)

Right now one of our favorite kid-books is Leslie Patricelli's Higher! Higher! (displacing our previous favorite, Yummy, Yucky by the same author.) In it, a young girl is pushed higher and higher on a swing, above treetops, buildings, mountains, and eventually into space where she passes a rocket. As we reached that page and I was trying to teach the sprogs the word "rocket", I realized they had absolutely no context for understanding what a rocket could be or do. So I pulled up Youtube on my netbook and they sat on my lap and we watched footage of the space shuttle launching, and as it blasted off I was literally in tears -- what an absolutely magnificent thing we people can do, when we're not too busy hating each other. I hope our short-sightedness never takes the stars away from my children or grand-children; seeing them there is one thing (and beautiful enough) but knowing that if we put our minds and our hearts to it we can go out there among them is too precious a thing to lose.

They may not have understood it, but man, they were glued to the screen. Good kids (-: