184/366: Odyssey

I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would've used for photo processing and blogging.

Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people's kids, and I'm not willing to post those. But here's a crowd shot:

The "dance party" phase of the Odyssey of the Mind tournament last weekend.

That should give you some idea of the scale of the event. This was the "dance party" portion, after all the teams had finished competing but before the final results had been tallied.

This was a looooong day-- we had to get there at 7:30 for the kids to do their Spontaneous problem at 8:00, then weigh in their structure at 9:15, and then their performance was at 10:15. And the award ceremony wasn't until 4:00...

The kids did a very nice job with their performance-- they flubbed a line or two of their performance, but nothing too bad, and their 13.5-gram balsa wood structure held 55 pounds before breaking, which was pretty impressive. They ended up finishing third in their division for their problem, which is pretty awesome considering this is the first time their school has ever had a team.

SteelyKid kind of hit a wall toward the end of the day, which was probably the strep starting to bite. But the less said about that, the better...