Both kids are doing First Lego League this year. Of course, they are on different teams (sigh) and going to different championship rounds (each round being a full-day commitment so MEGA-sigh). Our local organization is the Northern California Lego League; I’m sure you can find yours on the general FLL site.

It’s a really cool program. FLL was created to introduce kids to how fun and interesting science and technology can be through the gateway drug of Lego. Teams have an adult coordinator and sometimes a teenager helping out, but the kids have to do all the programming, all the project design, etc. There are three parts to the competition:

1. The robot game: What catches everybody’s eye with this tournament. The kids learn how to program a Lego robot to run around a game board and do various tasks, all within two minutes thirty seconds.
2. The project: The kids do research on the theme of that year’s FLL Competition and then present their findings to a panel of judges, whether through a skit or some other way of presenting it. All of the team members need to participate in this section, so it can’t just be one or two kids who enjoy talking.
3. The FLL Core Values: the driving force behind FLL is not just “science and tech are great” but “What’s this all about, anyhow?” The kids have to learn the core values and be able to discuss them intelligently with judges.

Every year there’s a real-world theme to the whole competition: this year’s is called “Food Factor” and it’s about food safety and contamination. Sophia’s team did a field trip to a sushi restaurant, to the middle school’s cafeteria, and to a local butcher’s shop to learn about food handling practices and concerns. Both kids’s teams came up with pretty cool real-world products (Simon’s team’s product is so cool I’m trying to talk the other families into doing a Kickstarter for it, but so far no takers).

Because the kids have to figure out how to program the robots and have to design the project and then present everything to judges, it’s really clear right away which kids have done the work and which had the adults doing the work for them. It does no good for adults to do the work (something I wish some parents at the kids’s schools would learn, SIGH), and one thing you learn right away is that these kids can do it. They might not do it well. They might not do it professionally. But man, some of these kids are amazing. (One kid on Sophia’s team was so into getting his robot to do its run correctly he worked in the basement of the team leader’s house for 4 hours on his own one night.) And if they’re not good at one thing (programming) they might be good at another (video editing).

This program is getting so popular several schools around us have FLL classes, with a teacher and all of last year’s Lego tools and lots of experience. These kids are well-taught and have great resources and are kicking our kids’s asses in the competitions. Both Simon and Sophia’s teams advanced in the first round, back in November, but I’m expecting both to get smoked in this coming round. (This isn’t just me; the other parents I’ve talked to feel the same way.) It’s like pickup teams facing the Yankees; of course the pickup teams have a chance.

If your kids are at all interested in science, technology, computers, robots, or Lego, and they’re between the ages of 9 and 14 (US/Canada/Mexico; 9 and 16 elsewhere, I guess), check it out. It will help you a lot if you can get people who’ve done it before involved, because for a newbie parent like me much of what was going on was baffling.

I’m one of the parent volunteers helping out with the 6th grade book club, which is part of Project Cornerstone, a YMCA-driven project in Santa Clara County not only to promote reading but to promote stories about values and questions kids might have. Project Cornerstone is really cool, and in middle school they create book clubs that offer lots of young adult novels with nary a vampire in sight.

This month’s book is The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. None of the kids has had a chance to read the book yet, so today we had a discussion of some of the background of the book, which concerns a young girl in Afghanistan who pretends to be a boy in order to support her family. Since we didn’t know anything about the book, we did some fun stuff, like marking off a 10-foot by 10-foot square in the middle of the carpeting to show the size of the place the protagonist lives in, and we discussed the subject matter.

This is what I learned:

• Some kids hadn’t heard of Afghanistan.
• None of them knew where it was, although Sophia came closest with “near India.”
• Some kids had heard the word “Taliban.” They didn’t know what it meant, though.
• A few knew there had been a war there recently. Even fewer knew that the US had been involved.
• A couple knew that the predominant religion there was Islam.
• Almost none of them knew anything about the conditions for women there.
• Almost all of them tried the hummus I made, and several tried the dried fruits that another mom brought.

We had a discussion about the title. None of the kids knew what the word “breadwinner” meant. We discussed why bread was slang for money, and why bread is so important. (I’m guessing not many of these kids have had to recite “Give us this day our daily bread” too often.)

I have no idea how atypical I was as a child (okay, okay: I was very atypical), but I watched the Evening News with Walter Cronkite every  night with my dad. I didn’t always understand what “Vietnam” or “energy crisis” or “M2″ meant, but I had some exposure to the news. A lot of these kids — from very well-informed, very successful families — are not getting this. I only point this out not to rag on these kids (they’re in 6th grade, after all) but to point out that it’s never too early to start talking to your kids about world events. Or to use big words like “breadwinner” with them. They were really, really interested! They want to know this stuff!

I have high hopes for book discussion next time.

The house we’re staying in is in the back of beyond. It’s so far off the beaten path, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live there full-time. The people who live here: Do they just surf all day? Are they artists? What’s their story?

Just sayin’: sometimes living sixty minutes outside of San Francisco feels like I live on the dark side of the moon. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live twenty minutes from the nearest town all the time.

We can see the stars here. There’s enough light pollution that we don’t see a huge sky full of the Milky Way. But we made out Orion and the Big Dipper.

As we were out walking the other night, Sophia said, “This is why they call it silver moonlight.”

I looked around, and indeed, everything was bathed in a bluish-silvery moonlight. Enough light to walk by, although I did step on a few rocks (it was an unpaved road, after all).

I wonder how many clichés (like “silver moonlight”) we’re going to rediscover. In a world where certain natural things have pretty much disappeared — the moon has never lighted anything in the Bay Area in my memory — it’s astonishing to run across the truth of old phrases I’ve certainly never thought twice about.

Got an unusual comment from Christina the other day:

You were a joy to read… before twitter. Now, not so much. Seriously, have you not better things to say?

Well, the Twitter is basically a way to have something to say, frankly. I suppose everyone who’d be interested in my tweets have probably added me to their own Twitter lists, so I could probably stop posting them here. (I’m DianePatterson on Twitter, btw, in case you’re looking for me.)

But to answer your question: at the moment I haven’t found a particular raison d’être for this blog. Many of the things I’d like to talk about really aren’t fair for me to talk about much (for instance: my kids—yeah, I know, I win some kind of Mom-points for finally figuring that out) and others are just…well…

There comes a time in every parent’s life where they realize they have lost control of their little kid. For me, this was when Sophia earned her purple belt in taekwando a few weeks ago.

  
“You want me to go to bed WHEN?”

Yesterday the Possummomma posted about a woman who said:

The school is supposed to give the kids a healthy lunch. So what that
there’s fact and sugar or chemicals. It’s food. We’re a working
class family that can’t afford to fix a good lunch for the two dollars I give
the kids for school lunch. The kids wouldn’t eat fruits and veggies anyway. When am I supposed to make these lunches? I work. Besides that it’s not my responsibility to go out of my way to make lunches that the school must give by law.

To which my only reaction can possibly be:

My brain reads “So what that there’s [fat] and sugar or chemicals” and it ‘splodes a little. What on Earth do you mean, So what? Are you the one in charge or not? Are you the one modeling behavior for your kids, or are you not? On what planet is it not your responsibility?

(In case you didn’t look at the webpage in question, in response to this declaration, the Possummomma shows her how to fix a good, healthy lunch for under two dollars.)

And with fruits and veggies: I honestly can only guess she’s never given them to her kids. My kids won’t eat everything — they won’t even eat all the things they used to eat. (Sophia the girl who could eat an entire bunch of asparagus when she was two won’t even touch the stuff now.) But we still offer them a variety of foods and they have favorite fruits and veggies despite being picky.

One of the key things I decided on early was that I was not going to be a short-order cook. There are a few choices for breakfast on school mornings — not as many as I’d like, but we tend to be rushing around in the morning and I keep the menu simple. I offer them a few choices for their lunch: they can pick what kind of sandwich they want or a thermos of soup, plus a fruit and maybe a snack. For dinner, I serve one meal. They can eat some of what’s put on the table, or they can pass and wait for breakfast in the morning. Strangely enough, they usually end up eating some or all of what I’ve served. Not always, and probably not with as much variety as I’d like. (For instance, they’ll usually have some of whatever starch I serve.) But they know they’re not getting anything else instead.

One good book worth checking out on the subject is Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes. And a quick glance through Amazon shows a number of books on the subject: Brown Bag Success: Making Healthy Lunches Your Kids Won’t Trade, The Top 100 Recipes for a Healthy Lunchbox, and The Healthy Lunchbox. Several of which turn out to be available at my local library, so I’m going to pick a few up and check them out.

I know it can be a pain in the ass to find out everything about everything, but please: this is your body, and your kids’ bodies. You take charge of what goes into them, okay?