JPL

Last week our family started a heartbreaking, but exciting new chapter!  We brought our firstborn to college!  As you can imagine, many feelings accompanied the turning of the page to this new season, but what we feel most is great joy and celebration that she is exactly where the Lord wants her.  Over and over, we were affirmed, finding one little God sighting after the next as we savored one last week together as a family of 4.  

We wrestled with how much time to take off to get her to school.  Do we all go??? But, 100% of my experienced friends said that these were days to prioritize and we needed to not worry about school and teaching and make these family memories together.  So, we took that advice and we have NO regrets!  Understanding, accommodating teachers and my wonderful former co-teacher Brittany, coming back to sub the second week of school for me, were gifts from God.

(As Ella packed, Ivy, never a fan of suitcases, seemed to sense something sad was about to change her world.)

  A crazy, once in 100 years, LA hurricane tried to thwart our plans!  We watched it carefully, contacted places we planned to visit, even cancelled our hotel to be safe, and eventually decided to go for it and just drive down despite.  We had no issue whatsoever and even made record time into LA!  Amazingly, we hardly hit the brakes at all!  We think everyone was hunkering down, the only explanation for why there was little traffic.

We had concerns about all of Ella's belongings fitting in our car with us, but she and Dave were pro packers/Tetris players and got it all in with enough room to spare!  Delia did have to spend a 5 hour drive with a hot pot in her lap, but it wasn't crazy!  At our hotel, we laughed as we unloaded several tubs, bags, boxes, and Ella's entire wardrobe into our little hotel room late at night.  We looked like we were moving in for good, I'm sure!

So, yes, we could have just driven down to LA to move Ella her new place for 2 days.  But, I thought it might be fun to be intentional about getting excited about her new LA home and making grand finale family memories together.  So, I added 2 days to our trip with a bunch of planned outings we knew Ella would love!  The first was a tour of  NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at Cal Tech.   This is an exclusive free tour, that books up in about a minute as soon as the tickets are released months in advance.  I scored some and we were SO excited for it!  The JPL campus is gorgeous, built right into the side of a mountain in Pasadena and full of lush trees, flowering plants, and outdoor meeting and working spaces.  The hurricane the day before made thousands of tiny frogs come out!  They were hopping everywhere we walked, to our delight!

Our tour had 22 people in it.  Our guide noticed Ella's NASA hat and immediately connected with her, learning of her background in Robotics, being blown away by her experience manufacturing carbon fiber, and getting excited when he heard she would be a college student nearby!  He sold their internship program hard and really encouraged her to apply.  Now is not the right time, since she's so new to college and car-less, but in the future this would be a dream for her and she'll probably try for it!

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are no stranger to Ella and her unique passions.  In a recent college class, she had to introduce herself by sharing 2 things she loves and 2 things she hates.  She said, "Space and robots" for her 2 loves.  This is a girl who has the Curiosity Rover as her screen saver and who cried in the "Goodnight Oppy" movie.  JPL is the division of NASA that handles all unmanned space exploration-- in other words, all the robotics.  Ella was all smiles all day seeing recreations of her beloved Mars rovers and getting an insider look at how they, and other orbiters, landers, and rovers, are created and controlled at JPL!

I honestly thought this tour would just show us the grounds, a little museum, a gift shop and maybe a movie.  It did have all that-- but so much more!! We couldn't believe it when they took us into the actual Mission Control room!   We even saw a bit of live action as their many different robots all over our solar system were being tracked and communicated with!

Then we were taken to see the real clean labs where everything is created!  We saw the moon-suited scientists working on an actual orbiter, the Europa Clipper, whose mission in 2030 will be to explore the moons of Jupiter to find water below the surface.

We got up close to Ella's favorite (non CarbonKnight) robot, Oppy, and his "ancient" predecessor Pathfinder, who we love as a crucial character in one of our favorite books, The Martian.  

We learned a lot about interplanetary exploration and saw all kinds of cool stuff, like real moon rocks.

I don't know if there could have been a more perfect outing for Ella!  We all enjoyed this so much.  Her talents and interests have opened up such an amazing new world (universe!!) to us!