Transit of Venus

We spent our second day of Summer playing really hard.  Well, at least as hard as you can with 3 recovering sickies at home.  Nathan, Rose, and Ginger were all sick over the weekend.  It turns out that they had tonsillitis.  I took Darin to Cub Day Camp early in the morning. Then I took Nathan to get his blood drawn, then back to Cub Day Camp to drop Nathan off, followed by a few errands-Ugh! When I finally got home around 1pm I decided that the girls needed my time and we played hard all day long.

I had fixed dinner earlier in the day so all I had to do was turn on the oven and slide it in to cook (Funny, how I can't even remember what I made.)  But I do remember me and the Rose were in the middle of coloring, I got up to put dinner in the oven, then when I came back to her she had crashed.  She was dead to the world and slept hard for 2 hours.

On Monday there were 4 of us sick so we didn't have FHE.  I had my lesson all planned and we were going to do it Tuesday evening but then we discovered that a once in a lifetime celestial event was happening and changed our plans.  Never mind that only a couple of weeks before was the Solar Eclipse and we totally missed it.  Let's just say, it was my worst Sunday ever as Primary President, plus I was super busy with extra meetings.  I'm really sad that we didn't do anything for it but I really couldn't add one more thing to the day and I regret that I didn't prioritize better.

So, for the Transit of Venus I whipped up a pinhole projector for the kids.  Darin said, "I didn't know you knew how to do things like this mom."  Which makes me so sad, I certainly do know how!  I have a math and science background but apparently the past few years I haven't passed on my love for things like this to my children.  At least not recently, I've also realized the boys are forming generalities of their parents based on the last 2-3 years of experience.

Taking it out for a try.  We couldn't see the transit of Venus, but the children had fun experimenting with the pinhole projector.  Even Ken was totally shocked that I whipped one up from memory in all of 3 minutes.  Ken has never made one before.

The Sun setting.

Ginger was fascinated with being able to look at the sun.  Rose was still asleep and missed the whole thing.  We also experimented with making the hole bigger.  That made it easier to see variations in the sun (presumably sun spots), although it was fuzzy.

Nathan liked it so much that he decided to make-up his own.

Towards the very end of Sunset we thought that we could see the little, teeny, tiny speck that was the Transit of Venus.  We even drove around our neighborhood and tried to catch just a little bit more of the concentrated rays.