Dean and a new fascination with Space

It all started with the Easter Bunny scrambling to try to find a book on Volcanoes. Dean was showing a sudden interest in volcanoes that had lasted longer than a few days (which is how long his usual interest in things lasts - like his dinosaur phase and bug phase). He had been talking about volcanoes and eruptions and lava and magma and even using words like the "Earth's crust" for a few weeks. So the Easter Bunny decided maybe Dean needed a book about Volcanoes. We do live on a gigantic dormant volcano after all. It seemed appropriate. And since Dean is reading at about a first or second grade level right now, we're buying books like CRAZY. So yeah. The search for a volcano book was on. But it was like the day before Easter and Borders was fresh out of Volcano books. But they had these really cool Discovery Kids "Eye Wonder" books on just about every other topic you could think of and the Space book caught my eye. Let's go with the Space Book.

Oh my goodness. We have unleashed an unstoppable force in this child. He is OBSESSED with Space. He LOVED the Space book. Dean has read that Discovery Kids Space book MULTIPLE times and now knows more than I do about Space and the planets. He talks about Nebulas and Giant Nebulas. He talks about stars and knows that the sun is a type of star called a Red Giant, but he tells me that there are other types of stars like Super Giants and Super Novas and that one day our Sun will turn into a White Dwarf before it goes out. He knows the names of all the planets, in order. He knows that "Mercury is too hot for humans" and that Venus "has poisonous clouds of acid". He told me that the moon "got made" when a meteor hit Earth and "a giant piece of Earth broked off and that made the moon" (which honestly I thought he totally made up - but I looked it up - and he was RIGHT!! Who knew? I didn't know that. Turns out that is the theory most astronomers agree on these days!). But his favorite planet is Jupiter and he's very dramatic when he describes Jupiter with it's swirling (and there's always A LOT of emphasis on the word "swirling") storms and it's 63 moon (and yes, he knows that Jupiter has 63 moons and he can name the 4 largest, which are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - and I only know this because Dean taught me!). And he can tell you lots of interesting (ok, interesting might be debatable, but it's definitely interesting when it's coming from the mouth of a 3-yr-old) things about Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And guess what? It turns out Pluto isn't a planet. Did you know that? I think that is the first thing that has been disproven that I learned in school. Because it was totally a planet when I was in school! But I guess they've figured out since then that it's not a planet. So yeah. Dean knows that too.

Anyway, since the Easter Bunny totally scored with the Space Book, Dean has collected a few more books about Space. We made the mistake of watching some Discovery Channel special with Stephen Hawking called "Into the Universe"a few weeks ago. That was an hour of torture for Joel and I. Dean LOVED it. But the ENTIRE time he was standing there pointing at the TV yelling and jumping up and down either asking "What's that, Mommy?" (to which I had no answer because I had NO IDEA) or he was so excited and shouting something like "Look Mommy Look! It's a Giant Nebula" (still no idea). Trying to get him to just be quiet and listen was impossible. He was too excited.

But a few days later we bought a Solar System mobile thing that you paint and put together yourself, made out of styrofoam balls and small dowel rods.

Dean did a great job painting the planets and he LOVES having his new Solar System hanging from his ceiling and is so proud of it! He picked out the paint colors himself and was very particular about the colors and was very accurate (he swirled together orange and yellow for Jupitor, he painted Mars red, Neptune was blue, Earth was blue with green smudges for the continents, etc etc etc). It was really cute! Here are some pics of Dean painting the planets and then one of the finished mobile.