This Past Weekend

 We had another busy weekend. These are in no particular order of the time occurrence of the events.

This top photo is of her at the Science Museum and working on the different experiments and projects they had that were special for Saturday.

 Here are a few shots while she is playing basketball at the tournament this weekend. We have seen much improvement but really she had nowhere to go but to improve. She did finally make her first two points in a game. She is getting good at getting the rebound and trying to jump up and take another shot and getting the follow but now she needs to learn how to sync those free throws. They keep bouncing off the rim.

 This next picture is from our monthly for each meeting. They did a science experiment across three different tables of kids.

 Here she is with the Harry Potter golden snitch Valentine box that she made. She  brought it to the 4H meeting for the Valentine Fox contest and both she and her brother one one of the prizes.

Next up is a boat project they had to do for science class, I believe. There were a couple of rules they had to follow one main one was that the bottom of the boat that touch the water had to be completely metal. Another rule was that it had to float for a certain length of time with 50 pennies in it. They had to work on their own and design something that would work. She had three cups to balance out over her pie plate to split her pennies into so it wouldn't tip over. 

Here is a class at Shattuck Saint Mary's  where she is about learning about hearts that included a dissection of a pig or cow Heart during the last hour of the class. She had a friend from school go with her and four friends from swim team were there as well her friend from school didn't care for the smell during the dissection part so she left the room so the other kids in the pictures above are from swim team.

Finally, we took the kids to the winter carnival in St Paul for the first time to see the ice castle and all the amazing ice sculptures there. I thought that was pretty neat to see. 

1st Basketball Ball Game Ever

Well, what can I say. There is room for improvement. :) She pretty much went from knowing vvery little about basketball (& I mean very little) to going to a handful of open gyms and about 10 practices to playing in her first tournament. They have 11 on the team, but only 10 were there (one girl was grounded I guess). So, the coach pretty much split them in 2 teams of 5 and gave them equal playing time. He said he doesn't care if they win at all, just wants to see where they are all at and figure out what they need to learn so they can be better. I think they have 7 tournaments on the calendar this winter.

She goes between playing forward and guard. Mom was only able to watch the first game as Henry couldn't really handle being there for nearly 5 hours and dad was traveling all last week so he wanted to be able to be there for her (mom gets swim!). After her first game she said she was so confused and has no idea what is all going on.

I think she has the potential to do well. She certainly has the ability and determination, but she has so much to learn about the game itself so everything starts to make more sense and then the self confidence will follow, but I guess she did take 3 shots in the final game.

Oh, they lost all their games. But I guess they lost them all last year at this same tournament and then by the final tournament they won. So, we'll see what happens this year.

There are 2 good things happening here -- she is learning how to play basketball and work as a team and be in a position where she is out of her element, but also and even more importantly, she is becoming better friends with some of the girls on the team and finding "her tribe" at school.




Here is a clip when she was playing in the 1st game. She asked me to take a couple videos to send her teacher , so the 1st clip wasn't when she was playing. So, no need to show it here.