Two very cool nights...

Wednesday night Darly & I went to a Paramedic training class. See this friend of ours' SIL trains paramedics and they have a class each session where they need child patients/victims to work on as kids are different than adults.

So after braving the nighttime rushhour traffic and finding our way into the building (totally walked right past the door that was clearly labeled and open!) we get in and of course Darly is nervous.

Darly watches the other kids (my friend's kids who do this every time and are very used to it) and eventually warms up.

One of the Paramedic trainees comes up and tries to engage Darly who was still pretty nervous...but eventually she got Darly to participate.

They took Darly's history and vitals and then strapped her to a back board that I called a Magic Carpet...Darly said it wasn't much like a magic carpet...even though she was "floating"...oh well, so much for Mom trying to help. They then place the backboard onto the pram (stretcher?) and rode her around to a "ambulance" (room that has been built to look like an ambulance with a higher floor...although the great big window looking out at the parking lot isn't all that real...hee hee

Later Darly had her arm imobilized which was cool.

By the time Darly really got into things our time was up...but that's normally how things are with Darly. Oh well, hopefully next time we get to go she'll be more comfortable.

At the end the instructior (friend's SIL) asked the group to tell her about the kids one at a time and chewed them out for "taking the word of a 7y/o" for the history. She reminded the students that they had the perfect source of information for the kids...they're parents! But it seemed that the paramedics in training only used the parents if the children were too young.

My friend told me that some of the students were there for their second time and assured me that even though these students were almost done that they would have to do in the field training with experienced Paramedics. One guy has failed numerous times and SIL wants to not let him try again as he freaks her out.

I got to ask the difference between a Paramedic & EMT...EMT's have more training and when you call 911, chances are that you'll get a Fire Dept's Paramedic...who has been trained by a EMT in our area.

And our Second cool night was last night at the Observatory. We got to see how the Cassini-Huygens mission is going. Which kinda bored the kids a lot...but I found it very interesting and Darly was able to answer a very good question...What are those dark stripes on Saturn? Well the description below the picture tells you...but the kids only got the picture. And Darly knew it was the rings' shaddow.

After the slide show we got to go upstairs to the telescope and because it was a clear night we were able to actually view a few things. At first they had the scope pointed at a Nebula. I really couldn't make it out, but then I saw a picture of what it was supposed to look like and realized that I had seen it...should have looked at the picture first.

At this point some people began to leave. But the one guy hollers at another "Hey, can we look at M-15?" and he says "sure!"

Then we were shown a formation called M-15. This I could see. Yay! This is one of the Messier Objects, so I was able to show the kids from the chart downstairs...which made it seem more cool.

After that the guy hollers, "Hey, how about we take a look at Uranus?" and the other guy says sure! and I tried to find a picture that looked like what we saw...but all images online are much better than what we saw. It was a little smaller than a pencil eraser with a green halo.

And then the guy hollers, "Let's try for Neptune!" And they did. They couldn't be 100% certain that we were actually looking at Neptune because they had to manuver the telescope by hand for it as it was sitting very low in the sky. But it was still cool anyway.

The last time I got to go and look through the scope we saw Jupiter & the moon. And then this summer we got to see Mars, Jupiter & Saturn.

The Astronomy guys were telling us that there is one night of the year where all nine planets are visible...but you have to wait up all night to see them as they are at different positions in the sky. I'm hoping that we can go see that.