I don’t know what got into my husband this weekend! Despite a cold, he had some creative ideas for Satori. First, he wanted to show the distance between the sun and all the planets, and he used our floor to demonstrate. Our floor is the perfect space background, it’s black with millions of specks! Using chalk it turns into the biggest chalkboard. On one end of the room he drew our Sun, and then mapped out all the planets in accurate scale. Mercury through Mars were all close together, with Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune spread out across the middle of the long room. And Pluto was way on the other side of the room!
30 centimeters = 1 AU (Astronomical Unit)
He also drew the relative sizes of the Sun verses all the planets. And finally, he took our National Geographic (from the latest issue) and mapped out how far to the planet Gilese in our Milky Way galaxy, which is 20 light years away. On that scale, this time Pluto was less than a centimeter away from the sun, and Gilese on the other side of the room! It’s so informative to view distances mapped out like this! Satori now can’t wait until we unpack our telescope, but I think we’ll wait until summer of 2010, it’s too cold and snowy right now.
He and Satori love to do that kind of stuff. Earlier this summer they measured dinosaurs. 
You might notice the basement got a bit messy today! David then designed an obstacle course for Satori to run through. Jumping from rubber mat to rubber mat, crawling through tunnels, sliding up and down mountains, bouncing on my Bosu fitness balls. We cleaned most of it up, but you can still see some of the course. Yay for David this weekend!
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