milky way

Driving back from Oklahoma, the sun went down around 6 pm, when we were somewhere in Kansas, planning on stopping in another half hour or so to find a hotel. It felt like the middle of the night- it was really, really dark outside, because I-35 in Kansas is pretty unpopulated. Mr. Brown agreed to stop on an unlit exit ramp so we could get out and look at the stars. It was beautiful- you could see so many, and you could even see the Milky Way stretching across the sky. When Rose Pink got out of the car, she said that she wanted to be an astronaut so that she could bring me back a star. We showed Rose Pink and Nut Brown the fuzzy white band of our galaxy, and explained about stars being bigger than the earth but so far away that they looked really small. It was so awesome to see how beautiful the sky was away from city lights.

Nut Brown started to wander away and I grabbed him. He struggled to get away and then stopped and started to asking something- "------ go?" After he repeated himself several times, we realized he was asking, "Where hotel go?" We'd been talking about how the next stop would be the hotel, and he was stumped by the dark space around us when we got out of the car.

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Since we got home, Mr. Brown has been taking Nut Brown's boppy away from him after he wakes up, and only returning it for naptime and bedtime. It's helped Nut Brown be a lot more active- before he would just lay around and chew on it instead of playing. The first day Mr. Brown decided to sneak it away from him and tell him that it had gone somewhere interesting. When Nut Brown asked for it, Mr. Brown said, "It's gone on a trip! Where did it go?" He and Nut Brown discussed various places it might have gone- "Did it go to the zoo? Did it go to the library?" Nut Brown negatived each of them and finally suggested, "Milk Way!" Apparently the boppy had departed for a day among the stars.

Last night, getting ready for bed, he asked, "Milk Way? Milk Way?" to find out if his boppy had come back yet. I had him run up and look on his bed (sometimes it reappears there at bedtime), and Mr. Brown snagged it and had it "knock" on the front door while Nut Brown was upstairs. Nut Brown of course immediately came to the head of the stairs when he heard the knocking, and heard Mr. Brown say, "Oh, welcome back, boppy! Just in time!" Nut Brown ecstatically received his boppy and went back upstairs chanting, "Just time. Just time." I love the games we play.