The Launch...and the Meltdown

During the 1st week of September, our families launched some model rockets that Ethan had fixed up. This started a rocket craze at our house that culminated in our rocket competition which finally happened this past Tuesday. We were supposed to launch on the 24th, the day after Evan turned 3, but we have had a string of excessively windy days that have prevented the competition. So here you are, our rockets "Baby Bertha" (the blue and white one) and "The Wizard" (the green one) just after John finished painting them.




Ethan and Michole getting their rockets ready for launch.







Logan really got in on the action, too. He had a great time watching from his baby bjorn.

However, trouble came just after the 1st rocket launched. Evan became hysterical and didn't want us to launch any more rockets. I think the noise scared him, but really, who can understand the inner workings of the 3-year-old mind? From then on, he screamed bloody murder whenever a rocket was launched, then screamed if we didn't let him chase after the rocket as it came down. Who knew he'd go ballistic after talking about launching rockets nonstop for the last 5 weeks!?


Here, John is helping Evan not watch the launch.















Here is Grandy trying to distract Evan, showing him Grandad's "secret weapon," a resurrected R2D2 rocket from the 1st launch at the beginning of Sept.



This is the face we got every time he was upset. Doesn't it just break your heart? He and I ended up leaving before John launched our rocket the third time because he was so upset.














Sorry for the double vision here, this is just after our first successful launch of the baby bertha. Ours was the only rocket that was able to be launched and retrieved 3 times! We were declared the official winners of the competition, but to be fair, we did run out of daylight before everyone could attempt to launch a 2nd time.