Awsum's Minion

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

My mother came home at 6/7pm (even later than that if she had to buy groceries).

Me and my sister would come home between 1 and 4pm, depending on the school year and day of the week (sometimes even later, for extracurricular activities). We did our homework and study at least until dinner.

And somehow we were also expected to keep the house, and especially our rooms, perfectly tidy and clean. He complained about the state of our home all the time, often violently, to the point that both me and my sister now suffer from anxiety. And yet it never occurred to him that he could have fixed the problem by not sitting on his ass all day.

Did you know that babies from affluent families hear an average of thirty MILLION more words before age 5 than babies in families below the poverty line? For context, Les Miserables is about 650,000 words and it looks like this:

So it’s like reading this book 46 times.* And that’s not the total number of spoken words, that’s the GAP between affluent and poor babies. And these are the years in which the brain undergoes the most development. It’s mind-boggling.

So what I’m saying is: keep doing the thing. Do it to all babies, all the time. Narrate your day. Ask them for opinions. (“Should we buy the large bag of potatoes or the small bag?” “Gaabooglagje.” “Yes, just as I thought.”) Point out colors and shapes and letters. Let them scribble outside the lines and treat their babble like talk. Sing them nursery rhymes and Raffi songs and songs from the radio. All of these things are going to build their brains to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.