Outnumbered Two to One

After braving morning rush-hour traffic yesterday (I’m so grateful I don’t commute anymore), my tweeny-bopper and I (along with a surprisingly accommodating toddler) made it to the county wide spelling bee she qualified for late last month.

It was a pretty big event, roughly about 200 kids competed in a written competition for about 25 spots in the oral bee. They allowed parents and teachers to sit, while 50 words were pronounced for the participants who had to scribble them down on a sheet. My charge in the mean time was keeping a two year old from shrieking his way through all 50 words.

Luckily I had pennies and a baggie of cereal at my disposal, not to mention threats that the authorities were going to whisk him away if he got too loud. I got the occasional glares from various corners of the aisle I was sitting in, but what kind of mom would I be if I hadn’t learned to ignore those by now.

The spelling words started off harmless enough - “ballerina, hyphen, caboose“. Then gradually built up to “kahuna and hygiene“. The sentence they used for “quell” made me chuckle just a bit since it involved storm troopers and rebels, I’m not kidding. Later there was “gulag and boysenberry“, “ubiquitous and commensurate“, not to mention a couple I still can’t identify, something that sounded like “car” but wasn’t and a word I can only identify as “bat-ter-soy“. They wrapped it up with “mukhtar, pfeffernuss, and hoomalimali” just for fun, I think.

In the end my little girl was not in the top 25 selected for round 2. But she wasn’t terribly disappointed, she got out of school for the day, got BK’s for lunch, and didn’t have to deal with any homework all afternoon.

She also spent the rest of the day proclaiming, “I’m still a winner!” to anyone who’d listen.  Me and her dad both agreed. Her teenage sister…not so much.

And the winner is…

Sometime this morning my ten-year-old daughter won her school spelling bee. I was sitting in the front row of her school cafetorium on pins and needles as she and the other remaining student duked it out for five rounds. My daughter won out in the end with the word “percolate”.

Late last night was when we finally got around to reviewing her word list. As we went about tidying up, I quizzed her verbally. For the most part she did alright, although she did get hung up on certain words. “Innate” with one “n” instead of 2. “Exhilarate” without the “h”. At some point today, I knew her success would not only rest on her powers of recall but on the luck of the draw as well. For example, getting the word “lucid” over “colloquial”. You should have seen the poor kid who had to spell “colloquial”, the most he could muster was a series of squeaks and a final letter of “o” before finally creeping back to his seat.

“Percolate” in the grand scheme of things, was not a bad option. It’s spelled like it sounds, right?

Except when the teacher reading out the spelling words pronounces it “per-coo-late”. Percoolate? Really? This is an educator we’re talking about, with a better than average grasp of the English language. I assume. I might be mistaken.

Perhaps it was the slight shake in my head that tipped my daughter off. The look that said, “That’s not right.” Or maybe she remembered reading it or spelling it before. Either way, she called out the correct letters in the correct sequence and was proclaimed the winner.

Woo to the hoo. I really had to restrain myself from doing a victory dance, and not just because of my long dissolved dreams of being a spelling bee champion myself.

Now we’ve been instructed to study the Scripps booklet because she’ll be moving on in a month or so to the countywide bee, which includes words like “mukhtar”, “nachtmusik”, and “voortrekker”.

Makes “colloquial” kind of seem like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?

Our elementary school’s PTA was hosting a Harvest Festival fundraiser today, complete with “rides” and a petting zoo. I think they’ve sent home fliers every day for the last two weeks trying to work up some hype. Needless to say my five year old and ten year old (aka the tween) were working themselves in to a froth at the prospect of attending the big event.

The big event in question was a series of eight different inflatable “rides”, a rock climbing wall and a bungee trampoline type contraption. For this they sold $12 bracelets that gave you unlimited admission to all the “rides” except of course the rock climbing wall and the bungee, for which you were only allowed a single shot, extras would cost you a buck a pop. Oh and they had a hand cranked hamster wheel thing that was pretty popular as well.

I wasn’t too happy about shelling out the $24 for bounce house entries, but it went toward a worthy cause, so I bought each kid a wrist band and set out on my way to guard shoes while they frolicked.

I’m not a big fan of crowds personally, and hordes of restless children make me antsy. Especially since nobody knows how to wait their turn and I’m always compelled to run interference for my offspring just so I can muscle any stray line cutters back a place or two. Being mother hen gets a little exhausting actually. Pecking other people’s kids in the shins and such because my own kids are either too distracted or too shy to mark their territory.

They had a good time for the most part. Although that good time mainly consisted of spending an hour manhandling farm animals, and running the same inflatable obstacle course at least 17 times. It’s all relative I guess. Hopefully the PTA will earn the money back they had to spend renting all those air powered amusements.