On Sunday afternoon, (of a long, three-day weekend), Brady and daddy ran some errands…including the grocery store….the one that has a big toy section. I guess they wanted to kill some time because they went over and played around for a while….and daddy bought us all a toy. So yesterday, Labor Day, all the boys in the family…plus one lucky mom of course, had a fun day playing with (drum roll please) a model rocket! We took a lot of pictures of our day as usual. Couple things I learned: wash hair and style properly on days when Brian takes along the camera, my pink jacket sure does stand out in this crowd and….we may have a new family hobby!

 

First, we had to gather the troops at the breakfast table to assemble the rocket. Here is our design and construction team (I had to send at least two of them to get shirts for proper….and PROPER documentation)

The finished product! As you can see, one of the two aforementioned individuals who needed to get a shirt did it in a hasty manner and may have put it on inside out AND backwards.

We are go for drying! We had to leave the rocket alone for a couple hours to make sure all the glue set properly. The instructions called for wood glue and rubber cement. I raided my craft supplies and found tacky glue and a hot glue gun….seemed to work just fine ;)

This is our rocket ready for take off. We went to the nearby high school’s athletic fields because it was windy and we had NO idea how far this thing would fly/blow once launched.

Flight crew: looking tough and ready for launch 1

Again, not knowing ANYTHING about where this rocket was headed, daddy divided us up into launch and recovery teams (team recovery included me, Aiden, Logan and our bikes!). Here is launch team 1

Daddy sets up the remote

Logan contemplates his upcoming retrieval mission (you can’t see it, but we also had walkie talkies…mostly just for show and fun)

Recovery co-captain ready for duty!

This is me filming with the ipad. I’ll post the video too. It was hard to see anything because of the sun reflecting off the screen…I could basically only see my face…and messy hair!

 

Launch #1 was so successful, that we decided to use our other 2 “engines”. Aiden was in charge of lift-off for our second mission.

We had a parachute malfunction with lift-off 1, but it deployed spectacularly with our second attempt

Recovery was a simple jog into the field – I raise our rocket in triumph!

Look at Logan’s body language here….he’s like, “and then THIS and then THAT and then AWESOME” <--- not an exact quote, but you get the gist.

Look at the smile on his face!!

For our third launch, I learned how to pack the rocket with wadding, the payload, the engine etc. Learn something new every day!

While Logan, Aiden and I prep the rocket, Brady checks the field conditions

Check out this awesome set of pics. Here is Logan’s launch:  Press the button

Ignite the engine, see rocket take off

Nothin but smoke as it flies up in the air!