Dudes and Peacocks

After months of collaboration, frustration, and creation, the boys reached Destination Imagination!  Scoot and the Caterpillar joined teams this year, and both teams chose engineering challenges.

Scoot and The Dudes chose Breaking DI News, in which they were to build a weight-bearing structure out of newspaper and present an international news story, using recycled props. 

The structure's design looked familiar to some of us.  (Sorry about the picture quality.)  Sadly, it didn't survive the beginning of the weight testing.  The Dudes' strength was in their creative presentation of an odd little story.  On January 25th, a PETA protester expressed her views on seal hunting by greeting the Canadian Minister of Fisheries with a pie in the face. 

The Dudes did a simple reenactment of the scene, using a cream-filled origami newspaper water bomb as the pie.   Then they repeated it as if all the characters were mimes (no quotes available), then pirates ("Seal hunting for all, ye scurvy audience!"), then spies ("Here's a top-secret speech...").  They cleaned up their cream very responsibly, and it was a funny show.  They tied for second place.

The Caterpillar's team, the Fire Breathing Peacocks, selected the DIrect Deposit challenge, in which they were to deliver objects to unseen targets across a barrier, and do a skit about risk analysis. 

Their team name was pretty cool -- except that maybe it fit too well.  Pride and contention got in the way, and made creation difficult.  Of the six team members who began, one quit, one got sick (and tired?), and one was kicked off at the last minute for sabotaging another's device.  Seven children are allowed to contribute, so they pulled in one more the day before the tournament.  Rollo wanted to be the one, but I think the older sister who joined was probably more helpful. 

In the skit, a family group consisting of a dad (the Caterpillar), a daughter, and a grandfather with a checkered past ("I've been to jail before!") decided to go on a picnic in a park which was closed for construction.  They asked the audience for ideas to supplement the grandfather's lunch of haggis sandwiches, pickled pigs' feet, and chocolate-covered grasshoppers.  The crane operator warned them off, but they decided to use the intricate crane to send their picnic over the wall, anyway.  Sadly, they ran out of time after their first attempt.  I doubt they earned very many points.  But they were brave to try, given the circumstances.  And, as the difficulty of the challenge made it rather unpopular, they were the only entrants in their level.  So they were awarded first place.  Will this patched-up muster of peacocks try to get their act together and compete in the state finals?

That remains to be seen.  But I can testify that, on the home front, the creativity continues:

This message brought to you by the
Gentlemen's Facial Cheese Society.

Happy Valentine's Day!

With a dessert this good, how could it be otherwise?

I also hope you have a happy Olympics, happy new moon,

happy Chinese New Year,

and, our favorite, happy Presidents' Day!

The Mantle

The mantle of motherhood
wraps around me like a homemade scarf --
sometimes so constricting I can barely breathe,
sometimes unfashionable;
but softening me with every wash
muffling my selfishness
warming my soul
so that I wonder how my cold, lonely neck
ever bore up my head without it.


(In a more compact form, this won the One Sentence Contest over at The Chocolate Chip Waffle.  Check it out!)

Dread Pirate Rollo

Rollo has been carefully considering his future career choices.  Just after Christmas, he decided that when he grew up he would be a Mad Scientist.  Mad science being a broad field, he planned to specialize in designing toys which he would animate with "life powder."  I assume that is a compound he intends to invent.

Without cancelling that plan, he has had an alternate idea lately. 

"I know what I want to be when I grow up -- a pirate!"

He has already designed his ship, and has laid plans to relieve the Spanish of their ill-gotten treasure, establish a pirate haven on an uncharted island, and defeat Blackbeard.

He further refined his plan after we watched our favorite light opera, "The Pirates of Penzance." 

"I want to be one of the Pirates of Penzance," he said.  "Then I could sing all the time, and my brothers couldn't stop me!"

Springing Forward

By the time the hoopla of Christmas and the New Year are over, I have usually had enough of winter, and I am ready to think about spring.  It is reasonable, really, to begin a new year with the season of new life.  Most cultures did, didn't they, until the self-aggrandizing Romans turned the New Year into a bank holiday.  Never mind that February and March come between now and springtime; I have visions of planting and blooming and even canning.  This January the weather around here has not been very convincingly wintry, and apparently I am not the only one who is confused:

Besides all that, our book club's choice for this month was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver.  The best parts of the book are, naturally, about gardening, and my ambition has been growing.  I've been trying to figure out how to rig up a better seed nursery inside, which new seeds to try, how much of the yard to plow up for new beds, and it is all so exciting!

Until today.  Perhaps in order to prevent, or at least postpone, my gardening hubris, my body has come down with a cold.  Now I am ready to curl up under a blanket and let it be winter outside.  I'll read another book, one about running.  And maybe next week, I'll be excited about that!

Stash to Treasure: Sewing Chair

Even at its lowest, Dandelionslayer's drum throne is a bit too tall to fit (with me on it) under my new sewing desk.  So I looked for something more adjustable, and more back-supportive, and I found this at Goodwill:

It is a good height, sturdy, and comfortable.  But the upholstery is a little stained, a bit worn, and not my favorite color of green.  So, I searched my stash, and found this ivy print, the remains of a chair project I did a few years ago.  With some linen-look scraps for underneath, and some leftover Velcro, I had just enough to make slipcovers.

And now this little chair is just right!

Action!

Pinewood Derby cars took to the boards yesterday, and we all played our parts.

Here is Scoot, the racer.

His car, the Pion.

The Caterpillar on security detail.

Rollo and D2, loyal fans.

And the Pion takes first in lane A!  Scoot's car won its first two heats, then was narrowly edged out of the final.  Dandelionslayer worked hard in the pit, especially when a misfire sent Scoot's car down alone, and the pi holding the weight broke off.  Track management thoughtfully provided a glue gun for such eventualities, and the Pion was back on the road just in time.  I was assigned to refreshment rationing after the closing ceremony.  We managed our exit without undue drama, an impressive feat for our family at a pack meeting!