After larking about over hill and dale, across streams and through thickets, Simon and Frederick headed to the swing set.
Must just squeeze a bit more!
What to do next? To to the lake!
Begrudgingly, Frederick accepts that it really is too cold to go swimming.
It's probably Daddy's fault. 
Despite having a runny nose Frederick was very excited about opening Christmas presents.
Frederick gets a lesson about something as Thomas continues to plow through his pile of treasures.
Here Simon and Thomas prove that it is possible to have fun playing with one of Thomas's non-electronic presents, a LEGO game. Indeed, Thomas has begged us to play (and replay) this game pretty much constantly since he opened it.
Martha is watching in the background, waiting for a chance to strike (and steal one of the pieces).
This morning we met at his school at 6:30 a.m., readied to depart for the day-long competition. Thomas dozed on the seat next to me, and I dozed slightly as I followed the other parents in the dark on the interstate as we headed straight north past Saginaw to Delta College for the competition.
I really had no idea what to expect. I knew it would be madness, but I had no idea the level or kinds of insanity we would encounter. The kids were excited when we got there. They knew they were beginners and did not believe they would win (the coach did a good job of keeping their expectations realistic) but they were eager to do their best and put on a good show. And then they saw the competition....Some of those teams arrived in coaches, some were being escorted with a full entourage of support staff (coach, several assistant coaches, dozens of assisting assisting coaches, cheerleaders roaming through the building shouting out their team names) fully designed outfits--some even had their own food stuffs designed in the likeness of their teams.
While our team is a mix of kids ranging in age from 13 (Thomas, the only 8th grader) to 8 (half the team is 8 or 9 years old) many of the other teams were made up of kids that looked well into puberty. Team Gator was visibly shaken. Fortunately, the first event, answering questions about core values is right up their alley. I was coaching one kid, Kean, (pronounced "Kee-On"), and said, "Rather than say, "There is no 'I' in 'Team,' you should say something less sloganistic." and he said, "I thought about that, but then it would not be true." "What about 'Everyone contributed something valuable'?" "Not true," he replied. "What about, "Everyone had their own talents'?" I offered instead. "That," he said thoughtfully for a rather pudgy 7th grader, "would be stretching the meaning of talent, beyond recognition." They finished the "Core Values" questions about 9 and went on to the presentation at 9:30. This was their moment to shine. Most schools do a boring research-type presentation, in which kids stand up and just recite facts about food rot or whatever. But Valley requires that all kids from age 3 onward participate in an annual musical event in which they have to sing and dance so these kids have no shame about performing skits in public. So they wrote up their research into a Platonic Dialogue form and performed it dramatically. I didn't get to see this piece as one parent always had to sit back with our stuff to prevent other teams from sabotaging it (I tell you, these kids are brutal!) but I hear that Logan, as a farmer who swears that he keeps his cow pens clean but nonetheless is wracked with bacterial infection that is causing a plague of stomach infections and loose bowels. The kids were very pleased with this part of their day, too. But the fun was over because the real work was just beginning...
At 11:15 Team A (which included Noah, Kean and Thomas--these were their power hitters) were sent to The Pit. ("The Pit" is the massive room in which 6 tables are set up in the middle--think Fight Club--around which is a giant fence so no parents or stray team members can help or hinder the Robotics Team. [I forgot the mention that the very first thing the team had to do was subject their robot to inspection to make sure they hadn't "rigged" it in any way--as with horse and dog racing, this is serious business and they want to make sure no one illegally alters the pieces or "fixes" them with glues or magnets and therefore unfairly advantages their team. Can you imagine? Who really gives a shit that much?] Outside that fence is a massive throng of people shouting and jeering. Within the fence are the 6 teams competing, all at the same time, along with one judge each who is watching them like a hawk, looking for errors, and an announcer with a microphone who is making top-volume remarks that are supposed to cheer people but in fact only make everyone nervous as hell. Add to all this air horns and vuvuzelas and a blaring sound track loop of Gary Glitter, the chicken polka, YMCA and all the other NBA/NHL shite and you can just imagine what it is like to try to concentrate in this sort of environment.
Emily dresses as a bunny and Frederick ROARS (a little shyly) for the camera. (Note FOUR fingered claws, which he will wear. These details are important.)
After school the bunny and dimetrodon head to the mall for some shopping.
Apparently this unlikely couple like to ride the escalator together.
After a grueling day of fun and festivities, this monster came home. (And developed a cold. Maybe that's why these great beasts went extinct...)
Since this semester has been INSANE I finally decided to get to work on these costumes during the weekend right before Halloween--until Thomas announced Tuesday night at 9 pm that both were needed for the school party on Friday, October 28!! What made things especially intense is Thursday is my "big day" with my junior seminar, which is a 3 hour class, as well as my intro bioethics class in the morning, so normally all day Wednesday is spent preparing for those two events. AND--if that wasn't enough!--I had an appointment with the provost of our university the next day late in the morning to talk about the Center we have been trying to create (a topic for another blog) which has been stalling because the chancellor of our university "has concerns that Ann Arbor [read: her boss] may have questions." SO: Tuesday night, just before going to bed, I discover that instead of spending the next day preparing two classes and having a meeting with our provost, I will ALSO be making two costumes. YIPPEE!
SO, at 9 am I begin with the sail for the dimetrodon. To make things extra exciting, the provost's secretary emailed several times to change the time of the appointment:first it was 10:30, then 2, then 2:30, then 11:30, then 11:40. (That's why I'm working with my "smart phone" right next to me which makes a bring noise when I get an email, so I could find out if/when that damn meeting was going to be.) I was almost done by the time I had to leave for the meeting.
The meeting went pretty well but, by now it was almost 1:30 and I had to do the tail and claws. To make things easier I made claw-hands with 3 fingers but when Frederick tried them on he really hated them so off them came and I had to make 4 fingered claw-hands Thursday night. The claw-hands took an hour, so this was really annoying.
By about dinnertime I was done (except I wasn't because I had to redo the claw hands the next day) with the dimetrodon and started with Thomas costume--this guy from a computer game Thomas plays, Minecraft. He and I played it when we went to a conference together in Milwaukee last year. I really liked it, but I just don't have the time. I wish I did--it's sort of like Lego for computers, only much better, because you can make your own worlds anyway you want, which is right up Thomas' alley. And he is not only much more creative than I am, he's much more attentive to aesthetic detail: his houses are always beautifully conceived and planned whereas mine are just randomly carved out and scraped together. I started with a felt-cardboard hair piece which he actually really liked. I thought he would think it was ridiculous, since it make his head look like a cube but that was, in fact, the look he was going for. It was a real trick to deal with his own hair (I'm not sure where that all went) but he was really pleased with it, so that is all that matters.
The pants with the attached gray felt "boots" were relatively straightforward, since they are just like sweatpants and I just attached the little boots at the bottom. By this time it was bedtime and my back was spasming--I had to finish the rest Thursday night.
Here is Thomas, engrossed with important matters. The splint on his finger is because he jammed it during gym class last week. Amazingly it didn't stop him playing bassoon in Wind Ensemble for Flint Institute of Music later same evening last Monday, despite the fact that it was swollen to twice its size and the base of his hand was a deep purple. Yet, two days later, the morning he happened to forget to bring his bassoon to school he told his band teacher that the injury prevented him from being able to play bassoon.
