Buzzzzz

I think I may have mentioned that this was my post planned for February Instagram, but really, it’s not the end of the month yet, so I’ll save that for next weekend.

Instead, last Saturday was Spelling Bee Day!  Can you believe I don’t have a single picture from the bee? They made an announcement this year that all phones must be turned off, so I couldn’t even sneak in a phone picture!  When we arrived, we headed to the T-Z Registration Table, where we found that Maddie had been randomly chosen to go first.  And I thought last year when she was assigned #13 was bad!  Anyway, this really threw her, and even though Dave and I tried to play it down, the mom of the other girl from her school said, “Number One?  Oh! That’s BAD!”  Which didn’t help.

Anyway, Maddie stayed in the bee until Round 6, when she got the word “springerle”.  Now let  me tell you, I don’t want you or anyone to whom I tell this story to think I am making this up, or making excuses for her in any way. She did spell it wrong.  BUT…

She knew that word.  The spellers are given a 2,000 word list to learn, and all of the words until the last few rounds are from that list.  If you study, and she/we did, you will have an advantage. We had been over the list many times, we had made flashcards of the 20-30 words that occasionally threw her (schadenfreude heading the list), and we made up lots of mnemonic devices to help her remember weird things (like…accommodate has two c’s and two m’s because the word is big enough to accommodate double letters). People, she never spelled that word wrong, not even once. 

But the pronouncer said it wrong.  He pronounced it “springerlah” when it should be pronounced “springerluh”.  And that’s okay. I often mispronounced words so she would have to figure out which word it was just for that reason.  But she was concentrating so hard on making sure she didn’t spell “l-a” at the end instead of “l-e”…that she skipped the “er” before the ending.

As Dave and I walked out to meet her I said to him, “Oh man.  This is going to be bad.  She KNEW that word.  She is going to be heartbroken.”  And when we met up…she was. She cried and cried in my arms. “Mom, I knew that one!  I made a mistake!  I knew it!”  Ugh. My poor sweet girl.

When we watched the bee on Sunday night, we watched the whole thing, and she nearly cried again.  She knew every stinkin’ word in that bee except for “maxim” and “facilely”, two words that were not on the list. 

If you watched the bee, you may have seen that Maddie was also interviewed. Besides the interview she did on the day of the written test, WITF sent a cameraman and the host to our house two weeks ago where they interviewed her some more and took video of her playing with Herbie (who is now a STAR!), playing her flute, pretending to study her words,etc.  The interview turned out great,and I do have a few pictures from that I can show you!

Here is a link to the short interviews, they’ll send me a CD of her interview eventually, but I’m not sure how I’ll be able to share it.

Anyway, she’s already looking forward to next year, so we have to keep our fingers crossed that she makes the top 3 spellers in the school bee next year so she can try for her third and final time. 

Because the third time’s a charm, right?