29 April 2012

There was no school on Monday- another budget holiday- so we went for a hike.  This photo feels like it was taken a month ago.  It's been a very long week.

Abe competed in the Pine Wood Derby on Thursday.  He originally thought he'd make a car that looked like a banana slug, but the car morphed into a gold muscle car.  Becky broke off a piece of the bottom of the car trying to put the axles in.  The car held together pretty well until Abe's last race when the left rear wheel came off.  The wheel came in 2nd place while the car skidded slowly down the rest of the track.  This was Abe's first pack meeting to wear his snazzy blue bear kerchief, slide and hat.

Helen painted the block of wood with bright enamel paint without shaping it.  Her car won the family division.

 Brandan helped Gibson make his car into a bullet train.  Gibson could have raced his car all night-- he loved watching it go down the track.

Sofi keeps piling up math awards.  This week her school math team competed against 8 other middle schools at the regional Pentagames.  We thought Sofi looked like a military general when she came home with all the pins, ribbons and medals on her cape (the epaulettes on her cape help the effect.) Some of the awards are team awards and some are individual.  Her team won first place overall.

 Sofi uses the left and the right sides of her brain equally well.  This week Sofi also performed in her school's production of The Wizard of Oz.  This is the largest play her school has ever attempted.  Auditions for the show were in January and they've been working hard for months.  Their work came together in a terrific show.

Sofi showed some good initiative by organizing snacks for the cast for the last week and chipped in by taking a slow cooker full of snack foods every night.

Sofi played the part of the Scarecrow and was wonderful.  She was our favorite character.

The director double cast all of the lead parts in the show to give more kids a chance to be in the play.  In the shows Sofi wasn't playing the Scarecrow, she played a jitterbug.  This version of The Wizard of Oz had all sorts of unexpected characters like jitterbugs, ghosts, a skeleton.  The photo below shows Sofi in her jitterbug costume with one of the Dorothys.

Here's a photo of Gibson being goofy while we waited for Sofi after the show.

Abe had to copy Gibson.   ~   And after a week of careful consideration, Sofi decided to apply to the academic high school for next year. She put the fine arts school as her second choice.  We're confident Sofi will continue to use both sides of her very good brain.