California State Train Museum (weekend post: part 3 of 3)

We made a wise choice and decided to stay another night after the State Finals. We figured that as long as we were there, we ought to take advantage of the situation and go do some things that we hadn't been able to do otherwise - make a vacation of it. Sunday morning we drove from Brentwood to Sacramento and went to the California State Historical Train Museum. We have been wanting to go there for years, but it has always been an all day trip that we never got together.

We had a fantastic time! The Museum is very impressive! There are amazing displays and TONS of information. The girls loved it and there were times that I looked at Kevin and he had such a child-like, sparkle-eyed look on his face! It was as if he were four again! There were locomotives, box cars, passenger cars, mail cars, dining cars and sleeper cars. There were all kinds of displays about the history of the railroad, our favorite being the display about the surveyors. There were photos and artifacts. It is an amazing place.

Amanda brought a notebook and wrote down all sorts of information about the different trains. Amanda's favorite train was the Governor Stanford locomotive. (She did a whole report about Stanford University this year.) Rebecca loved the sleeper car because it actually moved like a real train does. She thought that was really cool! Katrina was at first disappointed because she couldn't get on the trains and the displays, but the farther along we got in the museum, the more you could climb and she was loving it! Her favorite was the smiley face train.

The coolest part for Kevin and I was when we were looking at the humonsterous cab-forward locomotive. They had all been dismantled, but the museum got the last one in the world and reassembled it in the museum. It is amazingly huge, and weighs over a million pounds! They had a staircase that allowed you to go up into the cab and look around. Since we had the stroller I stayed down on the floor while Kevin took the girls up to the cab. I was standing near the front of the train when two ladies walked up and one was going to take a picture of the other in front if the train. I offered to take a photo of both of them. When they came back for the camera, we got talking and one of the ladies told me that her father had driven this locomotive. I said this type of locomotive, or THIS locomotive? THIS locomotive, she said. How cool is that?! She said he had driven it for 16 years inbetween Southern CA and Bakersfield, until the mid-1950s when the trains got switched to diesel. We stood and talked to them for quite a while. Her husband, the other lady's father, also drove the same train. When Kevin came down from the cab with the girls I introduced them and he was just as interested to hear what they were saying as I was. And, no kidding, the first lady had been the financial secretary at McClane High School where Kevin graduated. (Not at the same time though.). We talked about famous train museums and sites and when we mentioned the Tehachapi Loop, they said they had ridden over the Tehachapi Loop many times. We have been lucky enough to see a train go through that loop twice, whereas they had been able to actually ride it! It was really neat to get to talk to them! (We wish we had gotten their names.) Another really cool thing we heard about this huge locomotive was that since it was built in 1944 that means that it was built by women. Very cool!

We were asked by a docent later on if the kids were enjoying the museum. We told him that the girls were enjoying SEEING all the trains and things, but we were enjoying HEARING and LEARNING all the great things that there was to know about this great part of our nation's history. Trains changed this country in a dramatic way, and it is wonderful to see so much of that history preserved!

At the end there was a toy train play area for the kids and you know we had a very hard time getting Katrina to leave that area. We are not ones to bribe our kids on a regular basis, but the occasion called for it and it was the lure of a toy from the gift shop that got her to move along.

We were there for four hours and could have stayed longer. Okay, Kevin and I could have stayed longer, maybe Amanda, but the girls were tired and hungry. They were soooo good for having been in the museum through lunch time! We treated them afterwards with lunch and ice cream. We had a wonderful day and we highly recommend this museum to anyone and everyone!

We also saw the terminus for the Pony Express and then went by the State Capital building, and then we headed for home! We had a great weekend!

See all the cool train museum pics HERE.

Found it! (weekend post: part 2 of 3)

There were several breaks in the State Finals competition that allowed us to do some geocaching around in the Brentwood area. We will always take any opportunity we can get to geocache together as a family!

We found sixteen this weekend (with only one no find, not bad!) and even reached our 1300th find mark! We found ones with magnets, ones with spiders, and even an ammo can! (You don't see those much any more, so we love them when we do see them!) Our favorite one had to be the Horse's Petunia cache. (Can you see the cache? It's there!) The girls thought it was hilarious! We also managed to crash a wedding in the process! Okay, so it was more like we crashed the reception. And, okay, we were sort of invited. There was a couple in the Brentwood area who met through geocaching and they were getting married and decided to make their reception into an Event Cache. There were several cachers there, including ones we had met before. It was neat to meet cachers whose caches we had been finding all day. One couple had a cache that we had a no find on, so I asked her if my assumption was correct on where the cache was located. I was correct, so later we went back and were able to find that one. We really enjoy caching in other towns and getting to see how other cachers hide their caches and what they think the ratings levels should be.

One of the things that we have really been enjoying is being able to cache using our phones! With the internet right in the palm of our hands, we can look up caches and log them right there in the field - on the fly, as I keep saying. Last night when we were driving home we stopped at a rest stop and we said, I wonder if there is a cache here? We looked up our coordinates, found that there was a cache 225 feet from us, found it and logged it. Technology is so cool! Geocaching is awesome!

Odyssey of the Mind State Finals (weekend post: part 1 of 3)

Five months of work went into this very day, as the Liberty Intermediate Shock Waves Division II Team headed into the Weigh-in at Heritage High School in Brentwood, CA. (Between Antioch and Concord, not the SoCal one.) They had worked hard,a nd this was their chance to prove it. The way here was not without "shocks" however. . .

After the team won first place at Regionals, they went about making another structure, with a few modifications. The judges had given the kids a few ideas, so they wanted to see if they would work. At the test, it held 326.3lbs. The kids were thrilled! That was the highest weight held to date!

The next night, the team appeared before the Kerman Unified School District School Board and were recognized for their achievements! They also did a presentation of their problem, which held 275lbs. As coaches, Tammy (the assistant coach) and I were so proud of them and excited to see them recognized for all the hard work they have done.

At this point, we had run out of balsa wood from the box I bought at the end of last year, so we ordered a new one. In the meantime the kids had to relearn the skit, as one of the kids, Devin, would not be able to go to State and John had to learn his lines. (Amanda, Wyatt and Brenda were also in the skit.) When we got the new balsa wood the team built a new structure, and we bought a small gram scale so we didn't have to keep borrowing one. When we weighed the new structure it was 3 grams over the weight limit! Huh?! We tested the new scale and it was accurate. We could not fathom why the structure weighed so much more!

In the meantime, a week ago last Wednesday, I was calling one of the girls, Brenda, to see if she wanted to order trade pins. I got her sister, who said she (the sister) was at the hospital. Thinking something had happened to her, I asked if she was alright. She said they were there with their mother, who had stage 4 esophygial (sp?) cancer. I was so startled! Brenda had never said a thing! We had absolutely no idea! Her sister said that they hoped that Brenda would be able to make it to the State Finals, but they just didn't know. We completely understood, but at this point we didn't know if we could even compete with only four members if the worst were to happen.

After a few phone calls we found that thankfully they can, so we also started to prepare for the contingency that Karina would need to learn Brenda's lines as well. Last Monday Brenda came to the meeting to tell us that her mother had passed away on Saturday. The funeral was going to be on Friday. We hugged her and told her how very sorry we were. On Friday morning, Tammy and I and two of the team members attended the funeral. From there we went straight to Liberty to help the team complete the structure during their lunch hour. That night we all left for the State Finals. Time will tell whether the distraction of State Finals was the thing that Brenda needed as a consistency in her life that would help her through this most difficult time in her life.

In the meantime we think we had figured out why the structures weighed so differently. The wood that the kids used first had been sitting for a year, curing. The new wood weighed more. Crazy. So, with one week left the kids had to modify their structure. They had to cut the cross supports down from two to one piece of balsa wood. And, despite months of planning, we went to State Finals without having tested it. (Sound familiar?)

We all drove up to Finals on Friday night, except for Brenda, who was going to be driving straight up on Saturday morning. We had the weigh-in at 8:35 and the Long-term Problem (skit and weights) at 10:30. At 7am (with a three hour drive ahead of her) Brenda had not yet left Kerman. The team went in for the Weigh-in and handed in their smaller structure. They were nervous about it, but with the original structure being so far overweight, they couldn't even take the "over weight" penalty and use the one they knew would do well. And then, Karina began feverishly trying to learn Brenda's lines.

It was a gorgeous morning and the sun was shining, but it was VERY windy, so it was pretty chilly. Heritage High School is a very new campus, and it is huge! Several of the team members had purchased pins, and during the breaks Amanda had a great time trading pins with the other kids. They got eight pins of their own region and then traded with the other kids for one pin from each of the other regions. That process was like a feeding frenzy! She also got a tshirt. They were really cool! The back listed the school and each of the kids that were represented at the State Finals. (Amanda's name was almost right smack in the middle of the shirt!). There were six different choices for the front of the shirt and then they screen printed them right there! It was really cool to watch the printers do it right there in front of you.

At 10:00am the team went to check-in for the Long-term problem. They got ready with their costumes, props, etc. and at 10:25, just moments before the team was called in to present, Brenda arrived. Karina was very relieved!

During the presentation the kids were a little bit off, having had so much to deal with in such a short time, and their skit, which was only supposed to be less than 2 minutes long ended up being three and they hesitated when they were putting weights on and kept putting small weights on. Anyway, when they timed out there was 305 lbs on it! That was the most they had ever done in competition. The judges put a piece of paper on the top weight and then they added another 100 lbs! 405 lbs on a structure they were worried would take less weight! Never in any practice has their structure held that much! Tammy and I were so thrilled, but absolutely heartbroken for them that they timed out when they could have had 405!

The team members commented later that they liked the judges at the State Finals better than the experience they had at Regionals, as the officials here made them feel more comfortable. Their instructions and questions were clear and not confusing.

At the time of their performance they were far above any of the other teams, but as the day progressed, several teams did much better, with the highest weight being 580lbs! Wow! (We had checked the Regional scores and knew there was a team that had held 560lbs at the Regional level, but we never shared that with the kids so they would not walk into State Finals thinking they couldn't win.).

There was still a chance that with their Spontaneous competition scores and Style points they could pull off a medal. They went in to the Spontaneous Problem with cheers from their coaches and parents. They came out smiling, telling us that the Spontaneous Problem official told them that they had done really well. (They aren't allowed to tell us about the problem until after World Finals.)

There was a four hour break, in which we did some geocaching (see part 2 of 3). We returned to the campus at 6:30pm and after sweating it out for two hours in a crowded gym with 300+ screaming kids (that part always takes WAAAAAY too long), they announced the top six teams in each problem and division. (Thankfully they started with problem 5 this time and worked backwards. We were problem 4.) They said sixth, fifth, fourth, (we were getting all excited at the prospect that they might have even placed as high as third) and then . . .oops! We missed a tie for sixth place. Liberty Intermediate! Yea!!! The team stood up and got their applause and then we all got the heck out of there!!! As we walked out of the building and into the cool night air, I realized how close I had come to fainting. Whew! It had been way too hot in there!

The thing is, no matter how well they did or didn't do, they had fun! They worked out issues together! They stood by each other! Amanda, Brenda, Devin, John, Karina and Wyatt are awesome!

See all the Odyssey of the Mind State Finals pics HERE.

Out of this world!

It's time again for the 3rd grade Science Fair. At Sun Empire Elementary the 3rd graders learn all about the Solar System and they each create a poster or project that shows what they have learned. Rebecca decided to do her project to show how far away each planet is from the sun.

We got styrofoam balls and yarn and Rebecca painted each of the styrofoam balls to look like the planets and then she used bright yellow yarn (to represent the sun's rays) and we calculated how far each planet is from the sun in terms of inches. For example, Mercury was 5.25" from the sun, while Pluto was 291.8" from the sun. (Yes, no matter what the Planetary Council says, 3rd graders still believe that Pluto is a planet.) And, of course, in between was Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Rebecca put a small note around each one saying how far each planet was from the sun in actual miles. On the base there was a paper with all the planet facts.

When she completed it, we took it out on the driveway to see how far it really was. The string for Pluto went all the way down the driveway. Rebecca thought that was soooo cool!

Today was the Science Fair where all the other classes and the parents get to come in and see all the great projects. The 4th graders, who did the year before, get to vote on which project they like the best in each class. Rebecca is really hoping that hers wins!

In the classroom, they tried to give her project enough room, but really, it didn't have enough and so the farthest planets were kind of draped over another project. But when I was walking into the classroom I heard other kids calling to their friends to hurry and come over to see her project because it was so cool!

There were some really creative ideas for displays. There was a solar system made from rice krispies and candy melts. There was one that was 3D. There was one that was a hat. There was one with the sun made from a large Tupperware bowl. There was one with a telescope that looked inside. There was one that the girls stood before and turned a knob to make the solar system spin. Katrina really liked looking at all the displays and on of my favorites was one with a smiley face on the sun!

Rebecca did a great job and we are really proud of her! She is out of this world! : )