“What are you?” They kept asking.
“The sun and all the planets,” he said.
We painted all of the planets on styrofoam balls to hang from his arms, but he was happy enough with having all of the planets painted on his sleeves, along with asteroids and the Milky Way. There’s a black hole on his collar.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
When he gets upset at school, they help him write a letter to express his feelings. How I love that they do this, even when its heartbreaking.
This was in his jacket pocket when he came home yesterday.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
Before gas prices inflated, we used to take regular sojourns over to Yellow Springs, home of Antioch, Dave Chappelle and, as one resident once told me, a population dominated by psychologists and artists. We took the ride over for our first visit in a long while yesterday, ostensibly for an artists’ studio tour. Mostly we just enjoyed the town’s usual spots, made a little more festive by the artistic theme of the weekend.
At sunset, we headed over to Clifton Gorge, and walked along the rim, which Declan inexplicably described as looking “like the North side of Chicago.” 
A twisted tree trunk on the path.
Obligatory fall leaf shot.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
So, this was supposed to be our first big week of preschool.
But the back end of Ike sneaked up on Ohio and smacked us with 50-70 MPH winds for several hours on Sunday evening, tearing down trees and fences and power lines, leaving about half the city and much of the state, still today, without power — our first Midwestern hurricane.
Schools are closed, traffic lights off, grocery stores stocked with few or no perishable items and both the city and state are in a declared state of emergency. Lots of my friends on the north side of town have been told that they won’t have power until the weekend. For reasons I can’t fathom, our power was restored after one peaceful night, but our town is, for most intents and purposes, shut down.
Thank goodness for 10-year-old aspiring architect neighbor girls.
Our block didn’t have any major tree-falling incidents, but the storm left a massive debris field of branches scattered across every yard. Our ten-year-old neighbor, banished from school, decided to use the remnants of destruction to fashion an elaborate tree fort in her front yard, and she sweetly let Declan help, and repeatedly indulged his desire to be tickled and scared.
From the side, you can see that they wisely constructed a railing up the hill on the way in.
The roots of the tree, I was told, are the steps to this entryway.
As I was taking pictures, she turned this sign from “keep out” to “come in.”
The inside room is cozy with its Hello Kitty blanket, and a mirror hung on the bark.
Sometimes the sheer awesomeness of kids makes me cry.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2008.
Some parents I know risk their feet and balance daily to toy cars, Barbie dolls or little plastic animals. In our house, it’s the Solar System – a collection that’s been growing for well over the past year and a half.
I try to get Declan help me to put all of them away in bins every night – inevitably making the floor a blank canvas for him to lay solar systems all around the room the next morning.
We’ve gone through periods of obsession with particular planets, and he’s long since rejected soft blankies with dogs on them in favor of shimmery fabrics from the craft store that he calls “the fabric of space and time.” He might be astrophysicist Brian Greene’s youngest groupie.
I replaced one of the shades on my back car window with window clings of the planets last year. And there’s nary a spherical object in our home that hasn’t, at some point, been substituted as a planet, moon or star.
The first acquisitions were paper and cardboard planets. One system went on the wall on his second birthday, but it only stayed there for a couple of weeks while he memorized their order. He learned their names when he was about 20 months old, during a watershed language-accumulating phase – one week colors, the next week shapes, then numbers and then planets – at his insistence.
Ever since, he’s wanted to hold his planets, to lay them out on the floor in order, to whoosh them past his face, one by one. The glow in the dark asteroids are used to make the asteroid belt sometimes. Other times he’s made it with a bunch of crumpled scraps of paper.
These are from a lunchbox full of small & mostly handmade things, there are dried balls of Play-doh that he made and Fimo shapes we made together (the flat sparkly one is Andromeda galaxy). There are also eight big marbles that his dad got for him, which Declan promptly gave planetary names.
This week’s most popular solar system is made up of balls from around the house. There are 10 because this collection includes Pluto and Charon, its moon. (I’m never sure which planet’s moons are going to make it into the mix.)
This is a nesting toy that readily became the outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and missing Pluto (which has rolled somewhere else in the house).
We have a couple of different solar system floor puzzles (gifts) that he loves and has started to mess up and reassemble without my help in the last couple of weeks. And the last page of this Teddy Bear book (based on the jump-rope rhyme) has nine bears, which he renamed as the planets (again, Pluto included) several months ago.
These bath letters represent the solar system and more, straight out of the Interactive Universe web site he loves – they are (counter clockwise): Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Hale-Bopp comet, Haley’s Comet, Helix Nebula (subbed the backwards 2 because we didn’t have another H), Orion nebula, Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to us after the sun), Black Hole, Milky Way (Y, because we only had two Ms) and Andromeda Galaxy.
Recently, all of this playroom space travel started to develop into a deeper appreciation for Earth – its oceans and continents, its gravity, all of the unique ingredients it possesses that made us possible.
Because he insists that we continually remain on this galactic ride, that new appreciation for the earth, our place in the universe is all of ours, not just his.
—–
Also see Jupiter in its earthly incarnations.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
The theme for scarecrow competitors at the Ohio State Fair this year was Cartoon Characters:
(If you couldn’t tell, that’s Betty Boop below the Spongebob picture. The bottom pictures Mr. Scarepants, Shaggy & Scooby Doo, Jack Skellington and Woody from Toy Story. There was a Speed Racer there too.)
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
You are so big and buttery, with your eight heads of Buckeye presidents.
You are like Mt. Rushmore, if it were in Ohio, except that Mt. Rushmore is in South Dakota, and none of the presidents that are carved into its rocky face are from South Dakota. You are simply the Mt. Rushmore of Ohio presidents, carved in dairy. You are about 2,000 pounds (one ton) and it took 370 hours to make you.
You are the best butter sculpture I have ever seen. The joys of butter John Glenn and butter Buster Douglas were easily surpassed in your presence.
I could just spread you on corn. Or eat you with steamed artichokes.
I love Americana.
(More Ohio State Fair pictures to come. Boy, I hit the wacky jackpot this year…)
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
We walked through the fragrant pathways of the Park of Roses at its annual festival for Father’s Day. We usually try and make it there on some uncrowded day when the blooms peak, because there’s something oddly calming, and yet completely decadent about strolling around 11,000 rose bushes.
There are other reasons that I feel connected to the place. My great uncle contributed to the growth of the park for many years before I was born. He was a master surgeon and a rosarian – a President of the American Rose Society for many years. Most will tell you he had a lot in common with the brilliant and thorny flowers that he tended so religiously throughout his life. That generation of my family has passed, but many of the things at the festival seem preserved in their time. The people who conceived of this park knew how to take nature and shape it into a field of fantasy, and they didn’t require computer simulations to do it.
One of the first things we saw was a men’s glee club, where the median age was probably somewhere around 75. The group put on animal noses to ham up “Old MacDonald” quite adorably, especially the exuberant duck. Then they took off their hats and held them over their hearts to sing “God Bless America.” The gentle sincerity of their performance caught me completely off guard. Dan and I both got choked up.
Declan fell asleep soon after the performance, missing out on cool things like this wind-catcher, which I might have purchased if it hadn’t been sixty-odd dollars.
http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1181401&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1
In the wind from Tracy on Vimeo.
And of course, being in the city, not everything about the festival is old school. Note the only political campaign on the grounds:
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
It’s been said in recent years that NASA has lost its luster with Americans, or somehow doesn’t capture or inspire the public imagination the way that it used to. The kabillion** people who showed up for the open house at Plum Brook Station this weekend suggested otherwise. It was the first time the place had been opened to the public in 10 years or so, and likely the only time it will be for another 10 years.
We went, as part of our quest to connect Declan with a scientist or two in his beloved space field this summer. (Next year, I want to find a way to go to this.)
It was overwhelming.
Here he is, in the control room of one of the test facilities. The space shuttle had just lifted off for it’s mission to take a Japanese space lab to the International Space Station and rescue its toilet. We were able to watch it soar into the heavens on NASA TV. And Declan was able to pretend to fill a test tank with cryogenic liquid on the computer. (Or something like that.)
That is the lid to a nearly 200-foot deep chamber where they’ve tested rockets. It hasn’t been in use for a while, but it’s impressive. And kind of scary. (To me, more than to Declan).
Declan wore his “Galaxies fade away, all stars merge” shirt and carried a small space book around with him. His obvious interest drew a few smiles and comments from the very friendly staff. There were so many of them, he was a bit intimidated.
Here we are, in the world’s largest space environment simulation chamber, where a bunch of the components of Orion will be tested before they head moonward.
Given his longtime adulation of the liquid nitrogen geysers on Triton, this cryogenic demonstration was a particular thrill. Purple flowers were frozen and smashed, a balloon was deflated in the bucket that re-inflated as soon as it was taken out, and Declan got to touch a ball that was smoking cold from liquid nitrogen.
He also got to look inside of a manned maneuvering unit and took his own picture of a Robonaut. I have to hand it to the folks at NASA – there are a lot of places that purport to educate and entertain people of every age, but few succeed. The staff seemed genuinely interested in answering questions and offering information to its visitors, be they 3 or 73. (And I’m a tough critic.)
The whole Plum Creek site is so big, they bused us from one part of the facility to another. I wish that we had made arrangements to stay overnight and gone to the open house on both days. I didn’t realize how vast of a place it was, and how much there was to see. If we’d had more downtime, maybe Dec would have gotten comfortable enough to chat with a staff member or two. I suppose if space is still an interest of his when he’s (gasp) thirteen, we’ll know better next time… in 2018.
**Not an official NASA estimate.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
