Today was Kerry's birthday. First thing in the morning he was greeted with a crown made by Frances and Rutledge, coffee made by Frances, a card made by Frances, and a picture made by Rutledge (well, okay, Frances drew the head, eyes, nose mouth, hair, body, and left arm, but Rutledge made the right arm, the legs, the sun, and the mountains).

On Thursday afternoons we have our First Lego League meetings to prepare our robot for competition in November at the Science Museum of Virginia. Walter and Ollie are part of a First Lego League team that is working to complete the challenges from this year's program, which focuses on transportation. Working with Lego materials can be very, um, challenging, since the instructions frequently seem as if they were written by...engineers. Or some other people who don't always have a full grasp of how to adequately communicate instructions. I think vagueness is part of the purpose of this particular academic program, so we are still a bit confused about exactly how many challenges there are, how some of them work (can you really move this robot without knocking something over when the smart brick itself is wider than the path it seems to need to go down?), and whether they are linked together. But we still have a few more weeks to uncover the mysteries. Meanwhile, the boys have built the challenge course, which was no small feat. They have programmed the robot, such as it is at the moment, to complete the first challenge (though we don't quite understand exactly what the challenge is...), and one of the boys is doing research on current transportation issues and challenges for their presentation. During the course of the past month they have met with a graphic designer who helped them create designs for their team t-shirts, and today we had a now-graduated homeschooler who did JFLL and First Robotics team challenges for many years. Sam share with them what his experiences had been like, what to expect at a competition, how he learned over the course of several seasons about what will take them furthest in the contests, how to prioritize the challenges, and about how his teams divided the work involved. I think they were particularly impressed to hear him tell about how he spent 9 hours one night working on the program for the robot as the competition date loomed close by.


Frances is also part of a Junior First Lego League, which has a slightly different challenge based on a similar theme of transportation. I won't reveal the secret of the Lego Girls' choice for an item to be transported, lest there be enemy spies lurking here, but they also are preparing a display with moving parts, simple machines, and demonstrating how a good is brought to them in a way that is graphic and interactive.


In our family, we lose teeth around our birthdays. It is rather amazing to me that this front tooth did not come out on her 8th birthday, since it has been hanging by a thread for days. No, she had to wait until it practically fell out on its own. She was at the pool, playing ping pong, when it dropped right onto the floor. The last sentence out of her mouth before it fell out was, "I need to stop hitting for a minute because I need to put my tooth back in place."


I have a guilty confession to make:

I'm one of those people who has become pathetically addicted to Sudoku. I had avoided it for a long, long time. Then I saw it listed yet again on a "Smart Parents' Toybox" email that I get, and I thought it might be a good activity to add in for Walter with his schoolwork. And here I am now. Books and books of sudoku puzzles filled in myself, but I've only had him do one :) I lose sleep staying up to finish these. I find myself frenziedly filling them in at stoplights. I understand now why I saw a plain-covered Sudoku book that was designed to "hide" your all-consuming mania. The only thing that has made me feel better is that yesterday while I was waiting for the twins at their tennis clinic I saw another parent there off to the side filling in rows and columns of little numbers....