Dear Kid,

Some of us have the great pleasure of feeling short most of the time. I’ve met 3 year olds who are taller than I am. (Fortunately, I have a big personality to make up for my lack of actual stature.)

Some of us have the great pleasure of feeling tall most of the time. I imagine that people like LeBron and Shaq don’t often look up (literally speaking) to see other people’s faces.

But even those who play bball well enough to go by their first name alone are dwarfed by giraffes.

Giraffes are tall. As in really tall. As in the tallest mammal in the world. They are the gangly teenage growth spurt of the animal kingdom.

Not only are they tall, they stand most of the time. When you’re that tall, you flaunt it. You don’t even bother with high heels. Not that most manufactures make shoes big enough for giraffes (the diameter of their feet is 30 centimeters on average—that’s bigger than yours).

Giraffes sleep standing up and they don’t sleep much. They sleep less than college students during finals week, needing between 10 minutes (yes, you read that right) and two hours a day of sleep.

Giraffes are peaceful animals. When you only get 10 minutes sleep a day for your entire life, you probably just don’t care enough to fight with anyone else.

Giraffes don’t sleep much because they spend their time eating. A lot. And (a la moo) they chew their cud.

Like snowflakes, fingerprints, and zebra butts, no two giraffes have exactly the same spot print. (You knew that.) Some zoologists think their patterns are for camouflage. Clearly, these people know nothing about fashion; who wears the same thing as someone else? It’s just awkward.

Speaking of awkward (have you ever really looked at how that word is spelled? Even its letter arrangement is, wait for it, awkward), a giraffe’s neck is too short to reach the ground. So in a gangly, awkward, ridiculously vulnerable move, giraffes have to spread their front legs or kneel to reach the ground for a drink of water. This leads to many arguments between young giraffes and their parents about being sufficiently hydrated and watching for lions while drinking.

This part is really cool: because the giraffe is so tall (I believe I mentioned that part), when it lowers its head to drink it is moving about six and a half miles down-altitude. To protect its brain from crazy changes in blood pressure, it has valves to stop the back-flow of blood and elastic-y vessels that dilate and constrict to manage blood flow. NASA has done research on giraffe blood vessels (the better to build human space suits).

Being as how giraffes shop in the Big and Tall sections, they have hearts suitable for their big and Tall bodies. A giraffe heart weighs approximately 11 kilograms (even bigger than the Grinch’s post-expansion heart) which is used to pump 60 liters of blood around its body every minute at a blood pressure twice that of an average human.

The horny things on giraffe heads are called ossicones. They are unattached at birth so they can don’t injure the mama giraffe (for which the mama giraffes are most grateful). Later in life the ossicones fuse to the giraffe’s skull.

There are many subspecies of giraffe (zoologists care. The rest of us, not so much), and giraffes are already extinct in at least 7 countries in Africa. We should all care about that. A lot.

Hug a giraffe today.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Sometimes we take things for granted. We don’t think twice about having Google answer all our questions until we can’t get an internet connection. We don’t question having running water until the pipes freeze. We assume the light will go on when we flick the switch and only really pay attention when the power goes out.

We assume space shuttles will launch into space the way they’re supposed to—until they don’t.

Not having water or electricity is inconvenient. A mishap with a rocket is catastrophic.

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seventy-three seconds later, the nation watched in horror as the shuttle exploded. There were no survivors.

The investigation following the disaster determined that the explosion was caused by the failure of an O-ring seal in one of the two solid-fuel rockets due to the cold temperature at the time of the launch. After the Challenger disaster, NASA canceled all manned space missions almost three years.

That particular mission had an unprecedented audience because Christa McAuliffe was on board. She was a teacher from New Hampshire, the first “ordinary” US civilian to travel into space. (She had won a competition to participate in the training and flight.) America was captivated by the idea of civilians in space and tuned in in record numbers to watch the launch.

On this anniversary of the Challenger disaster, we remember the entire crew of that mission and those who died aboard the Columbia shuttle when it disintegrated on re-entry February 1, 2003.

And maybe the next time the electricity goes out for a few minutes we can recognize it as an inconvenience rather than as a disaster.

Love, Mom