Unfocused Blog Entry Alert!!!!!!!


I am blogging by starlight tonight.  Above me hanging in the blackness is one clear 3/4's of a moon and a thousand little sparkles.  I forget how beautiful the night sky can be when I am not in a place that is polluted by the light of mankind.  I am rapidly becoming a space geek.  I love the mystery and the infinite vastness of the evergrowing universe that our little marble of a planet floats in.  Just recently NASA release data gained by The Kepler Telescope (that has 33,000 times of a wider range than the Hubble), which is their newest space toy.  In just a small study that only lasted 43 days and covering just a speck of the space that surrounds is it began to examine 156,000 sun-like stars in a region that hosts around 4.5 million  various stars.  Think about that a bit.  This telescope zoomed in on a indistingushable drop in our sky and found there to be millions of stars that it can detect.  The Kelpler plans on examining this small slice of space for the next couple of years.  The goal of the Kepler is to search out planets that are comparable to Earth in size and in distance from their own star.

Detecting stars is a pretty easy task, compared to the one of trying to locate other planets.  After only 43 days the Kepler identified some where between 400 and 700 new planets.  Which has been called by NASA to be the tip of the iceberg.  In November of 2011 the full results of this study are expected to reveal tens of thousands of newly discovered planets...out of this little speck in space!!!  In the next ten years or so it appears that we are going to get a pretty good start to our education on how large the universe is, and in turn, how small we are.  In a couple years another telescope is launching to take a very detailed snapshot on each of these new planets we are becoming aware of.  My space geek meter will be spiked.  Pocket protectors and tinfoil hats for everyone!

For more info on The Kepler Telescope visit:  http://kepler.nasa.gov/

Or for a good video to keep things in perspective watch this:





And yes sitting here among the stars I feel pretty small. My problems seem small.  My worries seem small.  My war with my childs autism seems small.   Tonight Noah is taking part in his very first sleepover.  For the past seven years a lot of our work with Noah has focused on the theraputic side of things.  We have focused on speech, and motor skills and other developmental delays.  Over those last years he has made incredible progress...but now we are moving into the scarier realm:  The Social.  Gulp.  A lot of Noah's week is being put into teambuilding and social situations to help him connect with his fellow human.  It's not that he doesn't like people, because he does!  He is the most friendly and loving mother-scratcher there is.  But...he has a hard time understanding the motivations, feelings, and personalities of others.  This week he is getting a baptism by social fire...and I think it will be great for him.  His group of kids he is with is taking part in rafting, archery, hiking, wall climbing, go-kart racing, etc in replacement for some of the other therapies he has grown customed to getting.  Noah, like the Kepler telescope is going to be studying things (in his case other people) who are completley foriegn to him and going to be looking for similarities.  I have zero dount that this week will make a large impact on him.  He is going where Noah has never gone before:  Building relationships with peers.  I really want him to have friends....it has been so hard on him to make any real connections with people.  What breaks my heart is that he is begining to notice that he just can't seem to fit in.  I want to tell him "screw fitting in!"  I tried fitting in for years and it just delayed my personal development...plus it made me wear a lot of denim in the 90's.

So tonight he is at a big sleepover.  This is not the first night he has ever slept away from his parents, but it is the first night he has ever slept away from his little brother, Riley, since he came home from the hospital almost eight years ago.  Tomorrow night I will be giving some blog-love to Riley for all he has done for his big brother.  I was going to do that tonight but I can't.  To sit under this brillant canapy of stars and not just stare up into it with my mouth wide open in awe would be a sin.  I am going to spend my night in silence and thought instead of the clacking of the keyboard.  I am going to remind myself that all of my worries and the dozens of my material concerns are really really small in comparison to the what is going on above me.

Tonight grab a glass of wine or milk and step out onto your lawn and look up into the sky and give a wink to the billions of galaxies that fill up the dark ceiling above you.  Think about all the crap that weighs you down and remember that when you put those issues in proper perspective they can appear quite small and insignificant.  Even if you worries, like mine, break your heart.