Wait...it's May?!?

Ok, someone tell me how it has gotten to be May already?  I was just taking down Christmas and now I'm sweating like it is already August.  Wait, wasn't that how it was in December?  Seriously though, I have lost a few months here on the blog and I was doing so much better about posting.  So what has been going on you ask?  Speech tournaments, of course.  We had a tournament every 2-3 weeks from the middle of February to the beginning of May and working as Logistics Coordinator means I am actually working on things 1.5 to 2 weeks before a tournament so it was all I could do to try and keep the household going while doing tournament prep.

The girls had a great season with each of them taking 3 speeches to the Regional tournament - their duo on coffee, Hannah's Original Interp and her Open Interp on "The Day the Crayons Came Home" and Abigail's Open Interp on "Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty and Other Notorious Nursery Tale Mysteries" along with her Bio Narrative on Fred Rogers.   We had high hopes for Regionals and 2 speeches made it to the elimination rounds which was Abigail's Open Interp and the Duo but both of them only made it to semi-finals.  No invitations to Nationals were earned.

So you are finished and free for the summer, you say?  Well, no, actually not because the Monday after Regionals, we found an e-mail offering Hannah an At-Large slot for Nationals with her Open Interp.  Now I know you must be wondering why Hannah got the slot and not Abigail since Abigail was the one who advanced at Regionals.  The reason is At-Large slots are based on how you do with a speech throughout the season which accumulates points.  We were hoping for the same thing for the Duo but our points were not high enough.

Now we are planning a trip to Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, OK in the middle of June.   We have decided to drive for mainly financial reasons but also for the fun.  This means Gretchen and my mom can join us too!  So stay tuned and I will try to post as we travel.  Of course, I will hopefully do some more posts in between that time.  In the meantime, enjoy some pictures from our great tournament season!

Florida History

Gretchen and I are learning about Florida history this year.  I taught the older girls Florida History probably about 8 or 9 years ago and we had fun visiting different historic areas and such.  This time, I am doing a class at our co-op, so Gretchen is able to do many of the field trips with her friends.

We started out learning about the first inhabitants of Florida and focused on the Timucuans as they were in our area.  A field trip to Fort Caroline allowed us to see what one of their huts looked like.  We got a better look at a Timucuan village when we visited the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine.

We then moved on to learning about the Spanish and French explorers who came to explore the land. We learned about Ponce DeLeon who claimed Florida first and then Jean Ribault who led the French to establish a foothold here in the Jacksonville area.  Pedro Melendez came along and got rid of the French at Matanzas.  Let's just say the name means slaughter in Spanish. Then came the British for about 20 years and then Florida returned to Spain.  We enjoyed visits to Fort Caroline, Fountain of Youth and Colonial Quarters in St. Augustine to see some of this history.

Then we covered the indian tribe most known in Florida but not one of the originals - the Seminoles.  The Seminoles were actually Creek and other Indian tribes who were pushed into Florida and banded together forming the Seminoles in the early 1700's.  They were also joined by runaway slaves.  3 wars were fought to try and remove them from Florida but in the end, success was not achieved as they still have a presence here and are able to say they are the only tribe in America to not surrender.  Some of the students gave presentations about different areas of Seminole lives.  Gretchen talked about the clans.

We are now up to the time when Florida became a state and was part of the Civil War.  As part of learning that, we took a trip to Kingsley Plantation in north Jacksonville to learn a little of what slavery was like here in Florida.  We found it to be very interesting and Gretchen enjoyed learning more about the family she read about in Treasure of Amelia Island  I found the sea cotton to be very interesting.  It produces some beautiful flowers.  Hmm, wonder if I could grow any here?

Recap

Well, it has been quite awhile since I posted on here, almost 2 years.  Lots of life has happened in that time so this will be a brief recap.  When we last were together, it was the beginning of speech and debate season.  We had a really great season with all 3 girls making it to Regionals and then Hannah placing 2nd in the Region with her humorous speech earning a trip to Nationals.  She and I travelled with another club mom and daughter to Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, VA where Hannah competed and made it to quarterfinals!  This means she was in the top 32 speakers for Humorous Interpretation in the nation.  If you would like to see her speech, click here.

Later that summer, we had a graduation party for Victoria.

                                

It is hard to believe I have graduated 2 of them so far.  She is working 2 jobs at Publix and Maple Street Biscuits.  She is still trying to figure out what she wants to do and looking at possibly going to college in the future but then again, maybe not.

Kemie finished her AA degree this summer and is now working 3 jobs, one of them at our county election office.  This is due to turn into a full time job next fall so we are thankful for the Lord giving her this opportunity.

This leaves me with 3 to school.  Technically, I am only doing 1 because Hannah and Abigail are enrolled in dual enrollment at our local college.  I am still doing speeches with them and helping with their classes as needed.  They have both recently gotten their driver licenses and jobs, Hannah at Publix and Abigail at Chick-Fil-A.  Life has become real fun around here!

So that leaves Gretchen and I learning together and that is where I will pick up once again and try to blog regularly.  I may also throw in my thoughts on things occasionally.

Upstate Tournament

As I mentioned in my last post, we traveled to our first tournament of the season on January 6th.  It was held in Central, SC at Southern Wesleyan University.  It was quite hectic before we left as I am serving as Registrar and Logistics Coordinator for the region so I was on the computer answering lots of e-mails.  Victoria also decided that she couldn't do one of her Informative speech because the topic, human trafficking, was too emotional for her after researching it.  She is required to do a platform speech this year so I told her she had to write another speech for this tournament.  I did give her permission to use her script for this tournament.  She chose to write on introverts and then asked if she could switch to the category of After Dinner Speaking.  She was given permission and finished writing the speech on Saturday.

The first 1.5 days of the tournament are the preliminary rounds so Tuesday afternoon began the announcement of breaks.  This is when announcements are made about which students are moving on in their respective events.  Debate breaks were announced first and we were excited to hear that Victoria had made it to double octas in Lincoln Douglas.  She did not advance any further but it did earn her a spot at the Regional tournament at the end of the season.

 Members of our club, Apolojax

Speech breaks were made Thursday morning and the excitement was high!

 We found out that Victoria broke with her Open Interp...

 and Hannah anxiously awaited to hear about Humorous.  Can't you see the agony?

 Her prayers were answered and she made it to semifinals!

 Later in the day, many of our club members sat together to hear about speech finals.  We hadn't heard about After Dinner Speaking because the low amount of students only allowed it to break to finals.

 The girls anxiously await and find out they both made it to After Dinner finals!!  Yes, that was the speech Victoria rewrote and managed to memorize in time!

 Hannah also found out that she made finals in Humorous!  She was a little excited!

At the awards ceremony, we found out the results of their hard work!  

Now to prepare for the next tournament which is here in town!

Our Thai Food adventure

I really have been trying to get the blog updated.  We have been having internet problems, no, actually we just have lousy internet service that was just worse than usual, so uploading the pictures was really difficult.  Anyway, I finally got them up so here you go.

G is part of a World Geography class at her co-op and each month, we will be studying a different country.  We moms decided to do 1 from each continent except Antarctica.  The first month was Asia and the country that was chosen was Thailand.  I didn't know much about Thailand so mom received an education also.  We learned that the 3 popular foods were jasmine rice, fish along with other seafood and chilies.  They also use many of the tropical fruits like coconut, pineapple and mangoes.

We decided to try a Thai menu for dinner one evening.  One of the problems, though, is only a few in our family have taste buds that really enjoy spicy foods so I decided to make the meal in order to control the hotness level.  We found a recipe for Chicken Satay along with a Peanut sauce.   We also made some Jasmine rice.  

G had the job of threading the chicken onto the skewers.  She worked hard and had fun.

Abigail made some egg rolls for us.  Not really Thai but definitely Asian.  Success was had in not making things too spicy!!

Kemie and Hannah gave a try at wrapping bananas

which Kemie then fried for dessert.  I made some chocolate sauce to go with it.

 

We enjoyed it with fresh pineapple.  Yummy!!  

I didn't get a picture of the chicken and rice but couldn't miss out on this dessert!

  

There was also a recipe for a chicken and coconut soup that I wanted to try so we made that the following week.  It was delicious!!!  I did add a little more red pepper this time so it had some kick but adding rice to it made it doable.  That and a glass of milk!  I will definitely be making this again.