We couldn’t find any good pictures of chraime so we used it as an excuse to make some. The kids volunteered to prepare the dough for the challah. Luckily we managed to take some photos before everything was gone.

September 13, 2006 was a just another day for Pluto. It was still freezing cold, lifeless, dark, and minding its own business in the Kuiper belt. Little did it know that a couple of billion miles away, a bunch of scientists on planet Earth had the audacity to change its fate to the worse. The International Astronomical Union decided to demote Pluto. Rather unceremoniously, these human astronomers declared that Pluto is longer a "planet", and from now on – adding insult to injury – should be called a "dwarf planet".

This turn of events actually had nothing to do with Pluto itself. Pluto was still Pluto, with the same mass, the same orbit, and the same 5 moons. Pluto was demoted because science has changed. Astronomers decided that the scientific definition of a planet was insufficient and needed to be revised. Poor Pluto didn't satisfy the new conditions required to be a planet. And so, once the resolution was signed, Pluto instantly turned from one thing into another. Frankly, we don't think it ever got the news.

This is just one example of how science works. Science sometimes not only discovers things about reality, but also determines what reality actually is. When we were children, Pluto was a planet. Nowadays it is not. And throughout this process it stayed exactly the same.

When working on the entry about Pluto for Wikids, we wondered: what should we tell our own children about Pluto? Should we be content with calling it a dwarf planet, as a mere statement of fact? Should we say something about its past glory? How can we explain the fact that scientists changed their minds about what it is? It would be rather strange to talk about Pluto without saying something about science and how it works, wouldn't it? Any yet, we don't want our 4-year-olds to be too confused…

After much reflection, we believe that we managed to find some balance. Pluto is such a cool (well, freezing…) heavenly body anyway! This is only one of the many challenges we faced when writing Wikids.