We have moon fever in our house.  Serious moon fever.  Barış is obsessed with the Moon.  A month ago on the way home from creche he huffed and stopped walking.  Then he started pointing at the sky and was nearly in tears.  It turned out that the thing that had really upset him was that he hadn’t seen the Moon.  He was quite upset.  He asked me quite frankly, “mummy where is it?”.  Now that is a tricky question to answer particularly when it is dark because the answer needs clouds and these are hard to see at night.  I took a deep breath and explained to him that the Moon was there but he couldn’t see it because of the clouds.  At this point he started jumping up and down on the pavement, “clouds!? clouds!? Mummy you are joking, where are the clouds”.  Fortunately while quickly scanning the night sky I noticed a cloudless patch of dark sky where the color was slightly different and explained he could tell where the clouds were with the change in color.  I took a deep breath thinking I was off the hook when he then asked, “Why isn’t the moon there then?”.  Thinking how to explain this one, frantically I reminded him of the Sun and asked was it always in the same place and he said ‘no’.  I asked him ‘Why?’ and he looked at me with his big dark eyes and said in a matter of fact way, “Well because we (The Earth) is moving, we go around the Sun”, so then I went on to explain “the Moon also moves around us so we see it in different places”.  He got it.

So now we are on full Moon alert and every time he sees it we all need to stop and admire it.   Despite Moon madness in our house we have always explored the Moon.  Here are some resources you can use to explore the Moon: Read the rest of this entry →