“Stephen Hawking grew up in an unusual family...Stephen, his two sisters, and his parents lived in a big old house near London. Mr. and Mrs. Hawking never seemed to mind if the paint and wallpaper were peeling, the roof leaked, or the carpets were worn through.”

“The Hawkings house was a great place for adventure.”

We have been reading some GREAT kids books from the library. The Scholastic “Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Scientists” (and the Artists series, too) are good mix of funny comics, real photos, new vocabulary and real facts. We learn so much from these short kids books (highly recommend them!)

I found a really great time to read a book like this is when the kids are strapped into their seats/high chair around dinner time or during a snack time. They can’t go anywhere and we read aloud and I’ll chat with Liv about the book. Liv & Cohen are really young so when I read this book I talked about how Stephen Hawkings studied the stars and space. I skipped the pages that talk about his ALS, just because my kids are too young. I’ll prompt Liv with simple 2 year old questions like, “When we see the stars is it dark out? What else do we see in the sky?” She loves the moon lately! In this way, I find that I enjoy reading the book too. We do of course read a billion “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” little kid books as well, but throwing a few older elementary books in about real people helps keep it interesting for Grant and I :) We love reading non-fiction books with the kids.

As a new-ish parent, it is so interesting to hear what other parents do and how different people were raised. I just read this weekend that Picasso’s dad, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, was an extremely talented artist who was an art professor. So cool.

As I think about designing our home and making it ours, I LOVED this quote from the book…