That is So Cool!

My two oldest are a part of a co-op home schooling program where once a week, they find themselves learning cool stuff in someone else’s home. They recently have been studying botany and boy am I jealous. Two weeks ago they learned all about cotton blossoms. First they found out that each blossom only lasts for 24 hours. They start off white and quickly make a transition to a deep red color and then fall off. How cool is that? They also got a chance to dissect a blossom and boy could they see everything...stigma, stamen, ovaries, style...and an intro to the birds and the bees.

This last week what should they bring home to my surprise? A live, baby Venus fly trap. I love Venus fly traps. My very own Little Shop of Horrors! Feed me Seymour! I haven’t seen one since 8th grade science class at Dixon Middle School....with the teacher that was convinced her room was tilted. So far, we’ve fed our little beauties two flies and an earwig. I’d have every single trap full of bugs, but it’s been raining for the past four days and all the bugs have taken cover.

Both of these activities were a big booster following the fiasco that happened right after our astronomy project three weeks ago. Our kids created their own solar system with proportional sized planets, complete with an asteroid belt. Within a week of displaying our solar system down our hall way, those crazy, out-of-their-mind astronomers, whose heads must be the size of a meteorite (with egos the size of the Pistol Star), went and declared that Pluto was no longer a planet. Come on....it’s not like discovering that the world is round and you won’t go sailing off into an abyss. We need nine planets just as bad as Saturn needs its rings. If we can have a planet that rolls like a barrel, we can have a planet whose orbit is elliptical....and every half a billion years gets to have a David and Goliath moment with Neptune as Pluto sneaks momentarily into eighth place. How cool is that?