B-I-T-T-E-R

A simple word for you and me to spell, but was the downfall of our third grader's first ever trip to the spelling bee.

Our saga began about two weeks ago when Caleb came home with a folder full of spelling words and a permission slip to attend the area spelling bee on Feb. 27th! What??? Why in the world were we just now finding out about this and we have 500 hundred words to learn over the next couple weeks! After a little questioning, Caleb informed us that one of his classmates could not attend and his teacher needed a volunteer.... Ohhh, my sweet son volunteered! For those of you who don't know Caleb very well, he does not like to draw any kind of attention to himself. This is the child who used to duck under the table at restaurants if anyone came up to speak to us while dining! I almost beat him at the princess dinner at Disney World.....you get the picture.

So, we began intense training with the yellow spelling folder. On several occasions we had to have the "you volunteered for this" conversation. After a lot of hard work, last night we gave him the final speech...which pretty much amounted to, "we are proud of you no matter what, just do your best". Inside I was praying, "please Lord don't let him panic". I think I was as nervous as Caleb.

For whatever reason, parents were not allowed to watch their children participate; so Jim kept me posted via text messages. Despite our prayers, Caleb went out in the first round with the word "bitter". He quickly spelled it "bidder". He said the judge then asked him if he used a "d" or a "t". Caleb explained, he wanted to tell him "t" but he knew he had to tell him "d" because that's what he said. So he did.

I'm a proud mom tonight.....



Jim took Caleb to City Cafe for a good breakfast: