This is what it's all about!

I just love it when something like this happens.

K & M were practising cartwheels in the garden, because some characters in a series of books they're both reading do cartwheels.

They came inside asking about blue moons and telling me about how in The Witch Baby & Me there are two types of blue moon the 2nd full moon in a calendar month and also the 3rd full moon when there are four full moons in a season.

This lead to talking about the phases of the moon, new moon, full moon, waxing, and waning and also how you can work out whether there's going to be a full moon/blue moon and not needing to wait until it happens to find out. 

This lead to wanting to find out if they were born under a blue moon (like some of the characters in the book).  Given that they both have birthdays near the beginning of the month they definitely weren't under the first definition. 

In order to discover this we needed to know the longitude and latitude of Nottingham, where they were born.  Once we'd found this out we found out that neither was born under a full moon, never mind a blue one.

Discussion then lead to longitude and latitude generally and so we got our globe out, and a protractor and I explained that the longitude is found by measuring the imaginary angle in the middle of the earth between the lines from the equator to the middle and where you're interested in and the middle.  We also talked about since you're measuring from the equator you talk about the degrees north or south from there.

For latitude there is no obvious line where you would measure from, so we talked about how it had to be decided and that surprisingly enough it's in this country!  So more talk about the protractor, angles, centre of the earth etc. and a brief mention of the Greenwich Observatory as the line is called the Greenwich Meridian.

Then we moved on to looking at the International Date Line, and how it's rather wiggly to go round rather than through countries and why.  Then I spotted Tuvalu and mentioned that S, who is my best friend from uni, K's godmother and a geography teacher, has a particular quite random fondness for Tuvalu and has an ambition to visit it one day. 

This lead to both K & M deciding they'd like to go on holiday there and us trying to find out how much it would cost to get there.  We've managed find flights as close as Fiji so far!  We've also looked briefly at the size (10 square miles), population (about 10 500) and food (which for feasts include pork, wild birds and turtles).

Finally, for now, while talking about when we might like to go, we talked about seasons in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres being opposites, Winter/Summer and Spring/Autumn.  They're still determined that we should go there when they are still children (I'd suggested they could go travelling together when they're 18-20 or so, but they want to go with me and Daddy!), but have accepted it won't be just yet!