A busy day

 My older son had a robotics tournament today.  He is a judge for the younger kids.  Yes, he is weird as he seems.  This is his girlfriend.  They have been going out since 7th grade and are now in 11th grade.  She used to have purple hair.  :)

 My daughter just came home this morning around 4am.  She got about 3 hours sleep this morning, but wanted to see her brother at the robotics event, so we went out thrift store shopping and ran some other errands and then stopped by. You can see he was excited to see her too.  They really do like each other.  It's nice to have kids who are friends.

 This is the big banner she won for getting the Scholar Athlete of the year award.  It's a pretty big deal.  She was pretty proud of the award and didn't realize it was such a big deal until she saw just how big the banner was.  They are going to put her name on it one day too.  She thought it was pretty cool to have it hanging in the gym.  Some of the banners are really old and dusty.  I told her that hers would be dusty one day too as long as the gym doesn't burn down or fall down in an earthquake.

 Here's my son working hard, counting the points the robots earn during the round.  They have to move the balls into and across barriers.

 He takes his job seriously.  The tournament director messed up and did something very wrong.  He corrected her, but her dad is the teacher of the class.  It's hard to correct the teacher's kid, because who is the teacher going to back, the one who is right or his own kid?  You guessed correctly, he backed his kid, the one who messed up the whole tournament.  My son was pretty upset that the rules weren't being followed.  I could see myself in him as he tried to process allowing the tournament to go on even though the rules were right there in front of them saying they had to have 12 teams instead of 8.  The other kid said it would be too much trouble to re-do everything.  Her dad (the teacher) agreed that it would just be easier to keep things the same and since nobody else knew the rules, just leave things the way they were.  My son said, that they should do things the right way, even though it would require changing things and take more time, but it was the right thing to do.  He was over-ruled and had to just let things go.  He was frustrated, but I was proud of him for stepping up and speaking his mind and being calm about it.

The principal said she had watched him earlier and he was being a ref, but also a teacher throughout the morning and was always helping the younger kids learn how to get better.  She is so impressed by him.  Makes me proud.

And as we left the school, there were a few turkeys along the side of the road.  They must have escaped someone's dinner recently.