A 5th Grade Valentine

Hello and welcome to a sweetheart Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day!

Here's the Lego League recap from the 5th Grader:

Today, we will be talking about my last thoughts about this season of Lego League, since we didn't make it to Worlds.

Last weekend, we arrived at the C'mon Inn for Lego League State Championship. Yes, we are champions. But, sadly, we didn't make it to Worlds. Instead, we got second place for the Innovation Project. We also got participation awards, which were medals, so they made you feel special. But anyway, when we got to the C'mon Inn, we were greeted by the following: Five hot tubs, a taco bar, an amazing Lego League team, and fish. Yes, real, living fish. We saw fish because they were swimming in an artificial river in the center of the hotel. I woke up really early, and one of the staff members let me feed the fish. So, that was a fun experience. (My mom said they were koi fish.) And one of them was a goldfish. Once we got settled in at the C'mon Inn, we played in the water a little bit. Then it was time to go to bed.

On the morning of the competition, I had some Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a waffle with a smiley face and whipped cream on it. I ate that pretty quickly and we were off to the competition. In the first hour we were there, nothing really happened. We got a practice run with our robot. Then we had judging for our innovation project. We did well. Our innovation project was buoys for underwater archaeologists. 

On the first run for our robot, we did horrific. Two of the missions got completed. We got like 90 points. But the cheer squad kept cheering for the team. Our second robot run was a little better. We got 195 points. And then on our last and final round, we got 215. In the end, though, I think we did pretty well for being a young team. And we got second place for our innovation project.

Now that the season is over, I'm actually kind of happy because now the only day where I don't go automatically home is Wednesday, and that's for church school.

But I am kind of sad that we didn't make it to Worlds in Houston because I love going on adventures. 

That's the Lego League competition recap.

You might notice a sense of "moving on" from his quick dash through his recap. That's because he had. His mind was already on yesterday's after-school Glow Party and his class's Valentine's party. A month ago, he came home super excited. "Mom, I need to build a Valentine's Day box. It's going to be a castle." He spent the weekend figuring out how to fashion turrets and a gate from cardboard boxes, paper towel rolls, and toilet paper tubes. He cut, he painted. He cut and painted too much. He analyzed. He began again.

At parent-teacher conferences, I saw his castle had been transformed into a tank. He'd finished it at school, finished off with purple and pink paper, strings of tiny white beads taped on the front, and finished with his "signature" unicorn on top. The tank pipe thingy had a stopper in it. When the sweet day came, kids would pop the candy into the chute and push it down into the belly of his tank. I was impressed. Surveying the room, I was impressed with all of the kids' Valentine's Day boxes. A pond with a kid fishing in it. A big slab of cheese. A purple and pink monster with razor-sharp teeth. These were legit pieces of art - a far cry from the paper doily hearts on a shoebox from my day.

Wednesday night, he reminded us that he still needed to buy candy for the party. I groaned inwardly (a cliche, I know, but I literally did this. No exaggeration.) Years of last-minute Valentine shopping had taught me that the shelves would be wiped out by the time we got to them on Thursday after work. Miraculously, the shelves hadn't been emptied. We snagged a couple bags of mini Blow-Pops (no stick!) packaged like a Valentine card. Two in one! Score!

But all his efforts went into his favorite sweetheart of this school year - his teacher. For her, he crafted a box made of tons of overlapping Post-it notes in a variety of colors. At the supermarket, he thoughtfully selected the chocolates she would like best. After that, he turned to me and announced with all the seriousness a fifth-grader can muster: "I need to get her flowers." 

I convinced him to go with a potted plant, instead of a single flower, especially since the remaining choices were all red roses. "Not that kind of love, honey," I explained. He chose a pink pot of miniature pink roses. The leaves were pretty dry and limp, but he knew with a little water (and some love) they would be perfect.