Extracurricular Activities

So can I tell you how much I love coaching my Lego team?!?! We are experiencing a true creative process and I'm applying a lot of the development skills I learned at Andersen Consulting, just on a much smaller scale. The boys are really responding to the different challenges and I can see the kinds of professions they will wind up in some day.

One is already an engineer at heart (I know enough of them to tell...), one is never going to engineer anything but will be the sales guy who promises the customer all kinds of cool design features that can never possibly be worked in given the timeline and budget, one is just a really great, curious, talented kid, and one of my first graders is restless, fidgety, chases the other kids around the room, and is constantly goofing around but has the most raw genius and consistently busts out with the best finished product of any of them. And then there's Robbie and Charlie :)

So fun. In the picture above, they had just finished building the first phase of our barge-style solution to this year's challenge. (Long story short, it has to be something in the category of Think Green and their idea was a ship that will clean rivers of litter.) They filled the sink with water to make sure it would float. If there's anything boys like, it's seeing if something floats...

My other new extracurricular is my Scrabble Club. Laurie and I called a couple of other smart moms from PLP and we are beginning to play Scrabble once a month. It came out of a conversation in which Laurie and I were lamenting the brainlessness of bunko and how we needed to get out of the neighborhood a bit. Our first meeting was last weekend and it was so super fun. I memorized all the 2-letter words but Laurie still won by 4 points, playing qis for 50 points... Maybe next time....