All the Things Spring

When trying to decide how to name this blog post, I struggled.  I apologize that I can find no common thread in the things you are about to read.  So, enjoy a glimpse of our spring, which featured: crumpets, dinosaurs, roses, flying cars, paint parties, make up, wicked witches, donuts, new recipes, and Japanese spider crabs.

My Book Club read a lovely book set in London in WWII, so I had fun buying all the crumpets, scones, tea, and English Toffee that I could find at Trader Joes to compliment our great discussion!

Ella the Artist was my hero once again, donating a morning of her valuable to time to help me paint my ridiculous dinosaur shirts.  It's not my favorite school project, but she makes it much better. 

Our next drama production is already underway and Delia was happy when we found the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car visiting a local car museum.  When we went to visit, we even heard the car's PR lady proclaim that "The car IS the most important character in this play!"  Fun news for the girl cast to PLAY THE CAR in May.

The window for perfect, not fried in the CA heat, roses AND rain is small. I love when they collide.

Ivy up to her antics!

Easter Sunday, where we celebrated Jesus' resurrection with an absolutely packed sanctuary and a hopeful, bright future for our church.  And with some relaxing family time and delicious food-- including this new recipe which is a fresh take on the old Strawberry Pretzel Jell-O "Salad" using mascarpone, honey and just-picked strawberries.  A win!

Donuts and Dogs!  It's not a legit break without a drive to the good donut shop in our jammies with Ivy!  

Delia's love for color and fashion combined with Ella's love for art has given the girls a new interest-- fun makeup!  We first spent a little time at the beauty store browsing all the bold eye shadow pallets and then spent the afternoon trying on dramatic eyes.

Delia and her creative friends planned a Paint Party and had a blast one day creating and enjoying each others' company.  Meanwhile, Ella and her creative friends spent a day making a fancy Spring Break breakfast and then mastering the art of cream puffs.  Do I love that a good time to my girls and their friends is getting together to make stuff?  Yes, yes I do.

One Spring Break activity was finally enjoying the girls' big Christmas gift-- tickets to see Wicked in Sacramento.  We had a wonderful night enjoying dinner and strolling through the nearby Capitol Rose Garden.

Seeing Wicked with the girls, Delia especially, was super fun!  The music is familiar, but it was their first time seeing the show.  Delia gripped and grabbed me, her eyes big with excitement throughout.  We were blown away by the spectacular production design (elaborate sparkly costumes, constantly moving sets, cool lights, and even characters flying on ropes and harnesses!).  It was a neat thing to share with our drama-enthusiasts!  And to be back in a theatre enjoying a real Broadway show felt special too.

Without any big Spring Break vacation plans, we did ask the girls what their dream outing would be and both enthusiastically answered, "The aquarium!"  It's been 7 years since we've been members, and the girls wanted to revisit some of their best childhood memories.  The magic of the aquarium is for everyone, if you are in kindergarten or high school!  We marveled over our God of Wonders and His amazing underwater creations.

But, it was these Japanese spider crabs, in a brand new "Into the Deep" exhibit, that stole the show for us!  These are real.  I feel I just need to say that because when we walked up to their tank, that was my first question, "YO, are these FAKE?!?!"  They are monster crabs, with a "wingspan" of 12 feet, weighing as much as 40 pounds (larger than one of my students), walking around their tank both fascinating and terrifying us.  We are still thinking and talking about them.

Admiring jellies and tornados of sardines.

Petting decorator crabs and bat rays.

That clamshell is shrinking! ;) (For reference...)

Enjoying the salty ocean air.  We watched mama and baby otters and seals from the aquarium's deck.  We found Pacific Grove's famous "purple carpet", which looks especially stunning in the spring. 

We even dug our toes in that soft, white Asilomar sand.

There are about 5 more weeks of school left, which will fly by with all the usual end-of-the-year fun, including Ella's Robotics Assembly and Junior/Senior Banquet (another formal just for upperclassmen-- like prom) and Delia's play performance!  Cheers, Spring!  You've been good to us!    

Bidding 2022 Robotics Farewell in the Desert

One of my favorite online pastors posted a great piece of parenting advice a little while ago.  He shared that our kids spend so much time in our worlds where we are the "experts".  We don't need to try and be the expert in their world.  We should seek opportunities to let our kids be the expert of their own passions and gifts and teach us.  Their extra curricular activities are the perfect place for them to do this!  So today, with all of Ella's new free time, she and I spent a few hours together catching up at the coffee shop.  I listened and learned about 3D printing, omni-wheel driving systems, and her dreams for growing our Robotics program.  Getting this taste of her thrilling Robotics world, which I am admittedly addicted to right now, was also what prompted me and my friend Donna to hop in the car after school last weekend and make a totally spontaneous, and a little crazy, 6 hour drive to the desert to watch our kids compete one last time this season.  

This RoboMom Road Trip was SO FUN!  I'm a planner and a nervous driver, so to just up and drive 12+ hours in one weekend is quite out of character for me, but so worth it!  These are the special moments in our kids' lives that I don't want to miss!  This second competition was the Aerospace Valley Regional, honoring all the big name airline engineers that headquarter in the high desert of LA and sponsor it.  It had a different feel than Sacramento.  Being in the middle of nowhere had the whole team staying in a hotel.  Late nights in the pool and sitting around the tables in the lobby, playing games and laughing till we cried will be some of my favorite memories.

But, riding the rollercoaster of emotion that is watching our kids compete with their robot are also sweet memories I take from this weekend.  Here's the honest truth: our kids had no idea how good they actually were until they shocked themselves in Sacramento.  They went into this second competition with much higher expectations.  Because this Regional doesn't typically attract the big Silicon Valley schools, we were even more competitive too.  Finishing in a good spot (#12), but still battling a bit of driver error or robot malfunction had the team a tad disappointed after the first day.  Ella told me competing with expectation and even pressure made this Regional much more stressful.  While they did not finish in the very top like they were hoping, the team still made it to the finals and was still able to captain their own alliance, but once again got knocked out in the quarterfinals.  The picture above is their 3 team Finals Alliance.  They really liked working in this strategically picked alliance. 

Carrying Katana, their 125 lb robot, into her final match for the last time.

One last hang.

Time to breathe and relax!  Between the final matches and the awards ceremony is a super fun dance party.  A few brave members of Team 3669 even jumped in the conga line.

One of our alliance buddies came and delivered a personalized award!  So classy!  Our robots are Instagram friends now. :)  This relationship building and networking is one of my favorite parts of Robotics.

And this terrific team even won another award!!  This time the judges awarded them the Creativity Award for the unique way they designed their robot to hit the climb every time-- even though its chains and "many flailing arms" originally baffled the judges!  No Robotics team from our school in the 12 years it's been in existence has ever ended a season with 2 top finishes and 2 awards!

I'm so thankful Ella has found this world.  Having spent 2 competitions in it with these kids, I love them all too.  They are brilliant, creative minds who don't take themselves too seriously and love to have a silly, hilarious time together!  Their coach says they are a pretty special bunch, which might be a major contributor to their success.  With no seniors leaving, the junior leadership having actual competition experience now, and, hopefully, some more new members again next year, they'll be that much stronger in the 2023 season! Watch out World Championship, the RoboKnights might just be shattering history and coming for you next year!

"Magnificent 7" Kill It at First Competition!

On March 12, 2020, Ella's Robotics team was sent home from competition without ever having had the opportunity to fire up Rookie, the ball-launching robot they created her freshman year.  Then her sophomore year, they continued building a remarkable robot, Shorty, but alas competitions did not yet resume, so Shorty stared in a short documentary and impressed middle schoolers at an assembly, but never competed.  You can probably imagine the excitement and nerves as this year the team FINALLY took a robot they made, Katana, to a real competition in Sacramento last Wednesday!

Competitions are 3 days events.  The first night they set up their pit.  The first full day is inspection, prep and practice.  Imagine a college sports arena divided in two-- one half is 43 teams' pit crews full of every tool and spare part to fix any possible problem that may pop up as the robots compete.  The other half is the playing field.  Walking around is a whole vibe!  The place is buzzing with nervous energy. Robots on carts are being raced through the aisles to queue up in time for the next match.  When you hear a team shouting "ROBOT!" it means move out of the way, or get run over.  Donna said she felt like it was the ER with gurneys racing around and a "HURRY!  Code Blue!  We're gonna lose them!" sense of urgency. :) Some teams are super slick, hailing from Silicon Valley and sponsored by tech giants. Some teams are small and modest, like ours.  Everyone is excited to trade buttons and scout each other out-- asking questions about their robots.  Ella made lots of new friends and hopes to keep in touch via social media.

As I've written before, Robotics teams are composed of Engineers, who build the robot, and Programmers, who write the code that runs the robot.  Ella is on the coding end.  She is the Lead Programmer and wrote a pretty cool autonomous code that made our robot unique in its climbing task.

Dave and I loved going to competition as chaperones/mentors!  We rented a big VRBO and had the whole team stay together in one lovely house.  I planned fun meals and cooked them.  Dave was an unexpectedly essential pair of hands for the small team, doing everything from training our scouts to running to Office Max and Home Depot for tools and parts we forgot.  The first day of prep was stressful.  The robot weighted in at 126.5 pounds.  It has a 125 pound limit, so that had to quick be remedied to pass inspection.  Then the robot was not functional until late afternoon.  They even missed one of their practice slots.  Though most of the kids on the team are juniors, this was their first competition and it took almost a whole day to get their groove.

Every one of the thousands of Robotics teams that are a part of FIRST around the globe are given the exact same task and the exact same amount of time to figure it out (approximately 2.5 months).  How many people you have on your team, how much sponsor money you secure and spend, and how you do it are ALL different, producing no two robots that look alike.  This year the task was to taxi autonomously for 15 seconds, scoop up balls that match your team's color, shoot the balls in low or high baskets, and then climb a 3 step ladder in the last seconds of the match.  We simply don't have the manpower or resources to accomplish all of these tasks, so our team decided its strategy would be to nail that ladder climb-- it was worth the most points, and building a ball-shooting robot was something they had already done and felt a little unexcited about.  

Before each match, Ella served as the Technician, getting us plugged in and the code up and running, then she handed it over to the Drive Team.  The Drive Team can't step over the line and take over until the Autonomous time is done.  Then, once the drivers get the controls, they can move the robot around the course, picking up and shooting balls and playing defense-- something we were just okay at.

BUT, once we hit the climbing portion of the competition, we did it perfectly and consistently.  Our robot's carbon fiber body, "mouse trap" extending and gripping arms, and autonomous code that allowed it to climb without human control, were things that impressed the judges.  And once we made it to that top monkey bar, we scored a ranking point each match!  At the end of the first day of competition, we were ranked in the top half.  At the end of the second day, we were ranked IN 11TH PLACE!!!

To level the playing field and allow small teams like ours to have a shot against the 125 member NASA team that ended up winning the whole thing, the competition is run by alliances.  It's never one team against another.  It's always 3 on 3 and these are constantly changing.  So, sometimes you play a match with awesome teams that boost you up and sometimes you are with struggling teams that drag you down.  FIRST actually has a name for this brilliant taste of real life-- "Cooperatition".  A combination of cooperation and competition.  I LOVED watching this play out!  When we were struggling, bigger, better schools came to our pit to help us with repairs.  When we had a good match, teams came to scout us out and learn more about our impressive climb to maybe align with us.  The picture above is Ella fist-bumping fellow alliance members.   Lots of camaraderie!  In the end, our 11th place rank got us all the way into the Top 8, as a 7th seed team, able to captain and choose our own alliance to compete in the Finals with.  We did not make it out of the quarterfinals, but that was expected.  The team shattered expectations finishing as high as they did!

Competing and scouting for potential alliances are just some of the many components, though.  Over the 3 days, judges are stopping by regularly to ask questions about your robot.  They want to know everything!  How well you can articulate the build process and team strategy makes a big difference in how you impress them for the awards they hand out at the end.  Ella did much of our talking to the judges (she just had the best gift for that of everyone on the team), and we ended up winning the big Judges Award!! This meant so much to our little team-- that the judges saw something special and impressive in them!  Our RoboKnights got to run in front of everyone to wave and accept the award.

The team made their way home later on Saturday night, exhausted, but with adrenaline coursing through them from this "infinitely stressful, but infinitely fun" (to use Ben's words) weekend.  The whole car ride home was a conversation about how to take the robot apart and make everything better for their next competition in a week!

Dave's and my first robotics competition blew all our expectations away!  We could have never imagined the highs, the lows, the thrill, the stress, the heart palpitations, the tears, the hoarse voice from screaming, the prayers, the emotion, or the PRIDE a carefully assembled hunk of carbon fiber, chains and motors; some lines of code; and 7 pretty awesome kids would give us!