If you're happy and you know it...

So Sam started to clap her hands this week! I think it's really fun! She's also sitting up well enough to be able to reach out for toys and bring herself up again. AND she's waving hello and goodbye! She is learning so fast it's hard to keep up. It is so much fun to watch her grow and learn new things.

I went on my first work trip this week and I saw so much of a difference in just 48 hours! It was so hard to leave her overnight for the first time. Lenny did just fine - I was the wreck! I think she missed me too.

For my work trip, I got to go to Kennedy Space Center to check out the space shuttle Discovery after it landed on Saturday for post-landing inspection. My team at work had a flight experiment on this mission - we had a special tile made to stick out into the flow over the space shuttle's belly as it reentered. When you stick something far enough into the flow it changes the smoothness of the flow and the energy that flow puts into the space craft. Long story short...it was a success and we got to inspect the tile. We also got to see Atlantis stacked with the external tank and SRBs for STS-125 slated to launch in May. It was going through the last of it's check outs before heading to the launch pad, which we also got to see when they rolled out. It was a lot of fun and it's trips like that which remind how cool my job is. If you are interested, I posted a few pictures here - STS-119.