Map

After we returned from our trip to Ohio, Vinci drew this map.

The stickers in the corners are oceans (the four corners of the Earth?)
Our house in Boulder is in front of the mountains.
Grandma & Grandpa's house can be seen in the lower left, slightly farther than Nonno & Grandma Subie's house.
The house on the other side of the world represents Italy.

Eyes & Heads

At bedtime last night, I was reading (in The Story of World) a Hindu creation myth. It said "Long, long ago, there was only one gigantic man who lived in the whole universe. His name was Purusha. He had a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet."

Vincent commented that this meant he only had one eye on each head. "That's right!" I said.

Then Eddie commented that it wasn't necessarily so; he might have two eyes on some heads, and no eyes on other ones. "That's true, it could be like that," I conceded.

Motivation

Vinci drew a hundred hearts for me, while he was supposed to be eating dinner.

MouseBot

Eddie's been asking for probably a year now for me to take him to the hardware store to "get the parts to make a robot," which I've never wanted to do, since making a robot is much more complicated than he seems to think it is and I didn't want to deal with the inevitable disappointment.

Well, Anne somehow found the perfect book on the subject: Building Your Own Robots. The first project Eddie chose out of the book is MouseBot, a couple of motors wired to batteries and directly attached to rubber-tube "wheels", mounted on a vaguely mouse-shaped foamboard frame. When the batteries are inserted, it zooms around like crazy, bouncing off of things and changing direction. This is pretty much what he was imagining: we got a few cheap parts at the hardware store and assembled them into a robot.

Of course, he's noticed that you can't actually control or program this robot, and he'd like to be able to do that. I don't know if any of the projects in this book go that far—it would be easy to wire a switch in, I guess. If he continues to be interested, it probably wouldn't be hard to talk me into getting an Arduino to programmably control the motors.

Vinci likes it too:

First days of school

Eddie started second grade on Wednesday!

And Vincent started kindergarten today!

Lego prize

After going to the Boulder County Fair for several years, we noticed that one of the categories on display (with ribbons on some) were Lego sculptures (among the more numerous quilts, jams, etc. which one expects to be in competition at county fairs).

Eddie thought he might want to try his hand at this, so this year we signed him up as an exhibitor and he created a Lego sculpture, which we dropped off before the fair. The judges view them all before the fair begins, and you return during the fair to see if there's a ribbon or not.

Well, we went back on the first day of the fair, and Eddie's creation won first place!

It took him a while to really process his victory. After it sank in he'd occasionally mention "I won first place!"

Here he is after we picked it up again when the fair was over:

He won a prize of $4 with it, which he promptly spent on more Legos (he found a pack of used ones at Childish Things (a kids' thrift store)).

Museum

On Sunday, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We saw an astronaut on Mars, and Vinci got to fly a space shuttle. We also saw lots of dinosaur skeletons, and this big Lego creation:

Eddie was excited about the Gems and Minerals exhibit, because he loves jewels and treasure. He remembered from a magazine that his birthstone was topaz, so he kept a look out for that, and eventually we came across a really enormous topaz.

On Monday, he drew a comic about a villain who decides to steal the topaz from the museum.

Luckily, the police put Dog Man on the case. Unfortunately, the topaz is not actually recovered before we reach "The End" (Eddie tells me that the story will be continued.)