Spaceballs

I bet you're intrigued by the title of this blog post, aren't you? I thought it would be the perfect (and ridiculous) way to combine two recent Maddox endeavors: t-ball and a space museum. 

Maddox started in a parent-tot t-ball program a couple weeks ago. It's not a league and they don't play games or anything, it's basically just the parents and kids learning the rules of the game together and moving around to different stations to practice hitting, throwing, catching and fielding. It is super hilarious to watch a bunch of 3 and 4 year olds trying to play the game of baseball. My favorite part is when they put on the helmets that are way too big for them and have the kids hit and run the bases - it makes for some good laughs as the kids try to figure out where first base is :)

In the end, Maddox is pretty exhausted from all that baseball. Doesn't help that it's been like 90 degrees every week too. 

And now, for the space museum. Maddox and I went to Sparta this past weekend to visit my Grandma Gerry who was recovering from having a pacemaker put in. We stayed in a hotel where we got to swim  in the pool, and had a fun time, just the two of us. While Grandma was resting Saturday afternoon, we ventured with Grandma Danni to the Deke Slayton Space Museum in Sparta. I bet you're pretty surprised to hear that Sparta has a space museum, huh? Well Mr. Slayton was one of the first 7 astronauts in NASA's space program and was part of the Mercury Project. He was from Sparta and actually was in the class between my Grandma Gerry and Grandpa Roy in high school. 

The museum was actually a lot cooler than I was expecting. It was pretty small, but had a lot of cool information, memorabilia and fun stuff for Maddox to do. And it was only $3 for adults and Maddox was free - score! We had the whole place to ourselves and spent well over an hour there. The creepiest part of the museum was by far the display of Deke's Mercury space suit. They had it encased, lying down, with fabric stuffing the helmet so it looked like a mummy corpse. *shudder*

Did I mention it was also a combined aviation museum? And a bicycle museum? Hey, it's a small town - like I said, it was better than I was expecting.

Maddox in his space capsule. They even had space suit costumes to wear:

Saying his farewells before blasting off to the moon:

To infinity, and beyond...