Greetings from the land of the Metro train

This weekend, Mommy and I flew to DC on my favorite airline, JetBlue. Daddy greeted us and showed us around. My room is great. It has a gold coffee table and a couch with sparkly pillows on it. I also have an enormous bed. I like our vacation house a lot.

Over the weekend, Daddy and I got on the Metro train---the best train ever---and visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I wanted to make sure to see all the best parts, so we quickly took off to the exhibit with the aircraft carrier. I told the planes when to take off and land from my spot in the tower of the aircraft carrier. I also got to see a cool plane with a spinning propeller that has the engine on the outside. The engine spins along with the propeller. We saw some planes from World War II and figured out where the machine guns and cannons were on these planes. I also like the wheelwells---little circles underneath the planes where the landing gear can tuck in.

Best of all was the "How Things Fly" exhibit, which has lots of cool stuff for kids. We went to two shows at this exhibit. One was on paper airplane building. I built my plane and tried to fly it through the hoop to win a prize. It was not easy to get it to fly through. Still, it was fun. I volunteered to be the "line leader" which meant that I got to go first in flying my plane. We also went to the "how things fly" demonstration, where we saw lots of cool experiments. Again, I was the first volunteer and got to use a Magdeburg sphere. This is a sphere which is easy to open when there is air inside it, but almost impossible when there's not. I pulled and pulled, but couldn't open it when the air was taken out. Several people said I was the star of the show since I did a lot of smiling and chatting with the person doing the experiments. After the show was over, I told him that I knew about a particularly good kind of jet airplane---Jet Blue.

We learned all about the four forces affecting flight: lift, thrust, drag, and gravity. We decided to test these out at home by buying a paper airplane book and making paper airplanes. Daddy is mostly in charge of the making part, but I'm in charge of the decorating and flying. Since we have a big staircase, it's fun to fly them from way up high on the stairs to the living room down below. We've been doing some experiments by varying the flaps of the planes to see how this affects the way they fly. We've learned that by making flaps that tilt up, the plane gets more lift and stays in the air longer. We've also tried varying the thrust. When you give a plane more thrust (a bigger push), sometimes it can make a loop de loop. It tends not to do this when it has less thrust.

We also had a couple of accidents with our planes. The most serious one involved the plane banging into the security system and setting off the alarm. It made a loud siren noise. Daddy disarmed it and told the security guys that it was just a paper airplane that triggered it. Paper airplanes are very cool.