Yesterday was "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day." Since my kids spend all day with me at my "job," they got to go to work with Daddy. He works for an aerospace company, and the company set up some cool interactive science/engineering displays, including a liquid nitrogen demo. We had planned for the kids to spend an hour or so with Dad and then go to lunch together before heading home and letting him get back to work.

However, after lunch he invited us to go in the office with him, and he showed us around. We peeked in a couple of clean rooms and watched people building instruments destined for space (including one that will carry a set of small instruments he designed). We walked by the machine shop and saw how they make (metal) parts for the spacecraft and instruments. We headed over to a vacuum test chamber and talked with a guy about its purpose, and then we watched him get suited up to go inside (it's a clean room area, too, so he had to put on the whilte "bunny suit"). And we were invited into the test/measurement lab and watched how some of those machines work - one (some kind of magnifier) was set up with a penny so that it magnified the image of the Lincoln Monument and we could see Lincoln in the picture.

We all loved the opportunity to see science at work! Whether or not my kids end up in the same career field as their Dad, they have seen that he has a really cool job. And we're planning to go back in the winter when we can watch them build the satellite system he's working on now!