When my girls were little one day they spotted these kits at the craft store:


I hate craft foam, and we normally avoided synthetic materials in general, but I was feeling indulgent that day, so we brought them home. As we started to assemble them, I thought it was wrong that the prince had a sword and the princess didn't, so I cut a sword for each princess out of extra foam. My middle child was delighted for her princess to have a sword, but the oldest said, "No thanks, my princess doesn't need a sword." This prompted the following conversation:

Me: What if your princess gets attacked by a dragon?
Her: The prince will save her.
Me: What if the prince isn't around? She needs a sword in case she has to fight the dragon herself.
Her (shocked): But if she fights the dragon her dress might get ruined!
Me (sarcastic): If she gets EATEN by a dragon her dress will definitely get ruined.

She was unconvinced, however, by my flawless logic, and despite my best efforts, has continued to prefer the swooning princess archetype. Until she read this book:

The main character, Aethelflaed, impressed her so much she's dressed up as Aethelflaed for Halloween two years running. In a beautiful, flowing red and gold dress with a sword hanging at her side, a golden circlet on her head, she's the picture of this Celtic warrior queen. And Aethelflaed is exactly the kind of role model I love for my daughters. As daughter of King Alfred the Great, and fiancee (at age 14 or so) to Earl of the neighboring kingdom, Aethelflaed had a blinking neon target hanging on her back. Instead of living her days in fear of kidnapping or worse, and trusting in others to protect her, she takes matters into her own hands, insisting her guard, Red, teach her how to defend herself.

This training comes in handy when her travelling party is attacked on the way to her wedding. I won't give away the details, but suffice to say that the reader, who has come to love Aetheflaed like a sister by this point, is glad that her life doesn't depend solely on the skills of those who are sworn to protect her.

Aethelflaed grew up to become "the greatest heroine in Old English military history". This book only shows us a year of her childhood, and leaves us wanting more. Author Rebecca Tingle so skillfully weaves all the elements of Aethelflaed's live together, making what could be an intimidating character into a very human one. As a side note, after I read the book I discovered that Rebecca Tingle got her masters at Brigham Young University, where I spent some formative years. Later she studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, where she discovered the fragmented accounts of Aethelflaed's life that inspired this book. She started writing the book at Oxford, but finished it over the next few years while also marrying and starting a family. Given the stereotypes that abound about LDS women, I love to see a woman successfully combine her academic passion with her divine roles as wife and mother. Right now homeschooling and daily survival take all my energy, (I'm no Melissa Wiley or Alice Gunther) but I know this phase of life won't last forever and someday I'll create a masterpiece, too.

P.S. In writing this post I discovered that she's written a new book about Aelfwynn, Aethelflaed's daughter. I think I know what my oldest is going to be for Halloween this year.

We're blessed with a good friend at church who's a science teacher. He knows we homeschool, and he's always sharing interesting learning opportunities with us. On the Fourth of July he came over and did Diet Coke and Menthos experiments with the kids, and another time he brought over all the ingredients for making homemade icecream with the "kick-the-can" method. Once he even went on a walk with us around our property and shared his extensive knowledge of the local flora and fauna. I'm so grateful he's taken on this casual mentor role with our family.

Last week he called to let us know that the International Space Station would be visible in our evening sky. It passes this way often, but conditions have to be just right for it to be viewable. If its full daylight its brightness gets swallowed up by the brightness of the sky. But it has no light of its own, so if it's completely dark you can't see it either. It has to be dusk, dark enough to spot it in the sky, but the sun still near enough to reflect off it. It looks like a bright star shooting across the sky:

To find out when you can view it in your area go to this page on the Family Education website.

If you want to follow up afterwards by learning a little more about the space station here are some good places to start:

-The European Space Agency's website has a page just for kids. There's a lot of good stuff here. We learned which countries are involved with the space station. That prompted a little talk about international co-operation (that's an oxymoron right?) We also learned that parts of it were launched in 1998, the year one of my children was born, so that gave us an immediate reference point for its age. When it's completed it will be about the size of a football field, hard to grasp when it was such a tiny dot in the sky.

-NASA has some info about what my kids were most interested in- how and what the astronauts eat This page had a little info. The kids thought it was freaky that salt and pepper have to be in liquid form. Can you imagine the misery that would ensue in zero gravity if someone shook some pepper all over their food? (Maybe not, if you've never accidentally pepper sprayed yourself, not that I HAVE, of course) This page also had some cool videos and pictures. Here's a picture of their dinner trays, everything has to be velcroed down:


-Also from NASA, on this page, is a really detailed and interesting account of what they eat at "Cafe ISS" by American astronaut Ed Lu. The kids favorite part of his story was where he talked about eating trail-mix goldfish style, floating through the air and gobbling it up piece by piece.