Your Word Is "Syni-Kyni-Doty-Chody"

Last week, Adelaide finally received her spelling bee packet.

You may remember that last year, Daughter competed in- and won- her division in the spelling bee at the Iowa State Fair.  It was a wonderful experience.  She wanted to participate again this year.

As it turns out, that is easier said than done.  We heard about the whole thing last year because a kindly former teacher of Adelaide's saw the paperwork at school and thought that would be right up her alley.  This year, Adelaide started bugging me in, oh, probably December, to sign her up for the bee.  

I looked on the (really pretty good) State Fair website.  I made calls.  I left messages.  I sent emails.  And nothing.  

Derek's dad joined the search, calling around, trying to figure out just how the heck do you sign someone up for this thing?  Is there even going to be a bee this year?  What is happening?

Finally, finally, I managed to reach a helpful intern.  You should have heard me on the phone with this poor girl:  "Oh- OH!  A REAL PERSON!  Oh, thank God!  I'd like to sign our daughter up for the spelling bee please don't hang up please please help me I'm so happy to be talking to you right now."

She clearly read the despair in my voice, as she spoke in very soothing tones and said things like, "Okay, I'm emailing you the form right now.  No, I won't hang up until you see you have it.  Now just fill out it out and email it right back to me, and I'll print it out and get her entered right away.  Well, you are welcome."  

That was back in May, though, and Adelaide (and, okay, me too) was getting a bit nervous that her packet hadn't come, confirming she'd made it into the bee, as they do cap the numbers at 70 (although there were closer to 80 kids competing last year, so it would seem they're not as strict about the ONLY 70 CONTESTANTS thing as the application would have you believe).  

A few days ago, though, it came:  the letter of congratulations, exhaustive list of rules, packet of sample words, and ticket to the fair.

This picture has nothing to do with spelling bees.  I just wanted a cute picture of Daughter somewhere in here.  At the above moment, she was thrilled about having finally gotten the timing down for saying "Lumos" as her sparkler sputtered to life, then "Nox" as it died.  She is thrilled about the bee, too.

As we've been going through her packet of possible words, though, we've run into a familiar problem:  she and I both enjoy above-average vocabularies in terms of definitions, spelling, and using the words correctly, but our pronunciation is, ah... not so great.  I've gotten better as I've gotten older and been forced to interact more with actual human beings than books, but Daughter is just not there yet.  She was recently talking to Derek about something or other, and mentioned "waiting in a quay-way."  Astonishingly, he did not know what she was saying.  Eventually he did figure out she was trying to communicate the word queue, but only because he is fluent in Adelaide-ese.  (Adelaide-ese:  A dialect that uses rather advanced words, but pronounced phonetically, with the emphasis nearly always on the wrong syllable, and most mangled when the word is of french origin.  She hates franco-based words.)

Thankfully, we live in the internet age, and it's the work of seconds to pull up canny little videos instructing us on the correct pronunciation of coxswain and wokas and, my new favorite, synecdoche.

Oxford Dictionaries is a great resource for these videos, as is Emma Saying.

Sometimes, however, we need a little levity in the midst of such quizzing.  Pronunciation Manual is there for us.

Do you have any favorite words?  How about words you mispronounced for far too long?

The Good, The Sad, The Distracting, The Extraordinary

The Good of last week's spelling bee:

The small army of women who volunteered their time and abilities at the bee.

It turns out retired teachers are exactly who you want to have organizing and hosting and making a spelling bee happen for your child.  Adelaide is in the photo above, standing at one of the microphones, chatting with two of the volunteers and another contestant while waiting for one of the later rounds to start.  These women and all their superhero(ine) friends were amazing.  They were smiling and affectionate and patient and calming and encouraging, had looks of such compassion on their faces when someone made a mistake, excitement when someone correctly spelled a word, and the coordinator of it all gave each kid a hug and a few words just for them along with their certificate when they were out.  Any kid facing a competition deserves to be so mothered.

The Sad

There was a fellow contestant, a young girl, who in early rounds proved herself to be a wily speller.  She was given the word "scissors" and immediately said, "Scissors:  C-...." and then stopped.  There was a long pause, followed by her admitting aloud, "I just ruined it for myself, didn't I?" and my heart broke for her.  When she was finally able to speak again, she did so with dark humor, not even attempting to spell the word, instead uttering a rushed jumble of letters:  "D-M-O-F."  I laughed sadly- smart and funny!  I want Adelaide to be friends with this girl!  Then there was the *ding* of the bell that signified the misspelling of the word, and the poor thing shuffled off to the side for her consolation hug and certificate.  It was the closest I came to rooting for anyone other than our daughter.

The Distracting

When I wasn't torturing myself by trying to wind my legs ever tighter around each other in an attempt to relieve some of the tension caused by watching Daughter in the bee, I found a welcome distraction in the form of our boys, who were very good considering they had to be quiet and still for two hours, although thankfully Derek's parents were there and helped us keep an eye on them.  Atticus in particular helped me get my mind off my anxiety when he peeled a sticky label off a water bottle, put it over his eyes, and soon found that this was an unwise move on his part.

"I have made a terrible mistake."

The important part is he struggled not to remove his own eyelashes and eyebrows quietly.




The Extraordinary

Among her many prizes and spoils, Adelaide received two coupons for free ice cream at the fair.  As soon as we had concluded our business at the bee, we headed to the nearer of the two stands offering her free ice cream for winning, the Barksdale Concession stand in the Varied Industries Building.

Even though she had just won a competition and we were very proud, I never miss an opportunity to teach/force our children to do certain things like learning to interact with the world at large.  I therefore urged Adelaide up to the counter at the concession stand, telling her first what to do, because really, she is ten years old and shouldn't need our help with this kind of thing.  I will say we were a mere ten feet behind her, ready to jump in, just in case, so back off, internet critics.

That stand is mostly staffed by very young-looking ladies and men, and one of them first accepted Adelaide's coupon before turning to the one slightly older looking person there- who I assume was a supervisor- checking for approval, I guess.  This guy got down on Adelaide's level, took in the information, and proceeded to heartily congratulate her, announced to the crowd that this young lady had just won the Iowa State Fair Spelling Bee, and led them all in a round of applause.  He also encouraged another employee to top off our daughter's requested mint chocolate chip ice cream cone with a little extra ice cream, because she had just won first place, hadn't she?

That's Daughter in the purple shirt at the counter, Mr. Nice in the glasses on the left.

Oh my goodness.  So much kindness.  Adelaide was flying high, recounting the entire episode to me in case I had missed a single detail, absolutely delighted, and I kept asking myself WHY ARE PEOPLE SO WONDERFUL? while hollering "Thank you so much!" to the guy over the large crowd.  He smiled and waved you're welcome, and now I'm kicking myself because I didn't get his name.  I've had to console myself by emailing Barksdale Concessions and the Iowa State Fair, recounting the story and attaching the previous photo but zoomed in on his face, praying he'll get some kind of recognition for just being dang nice.

The Iowa State Fair Spelling Bee

Last week, in the days leading up to the spelling bee, Adelaide was nervous.  So, so nervous.  What had been excitement and fun anticipation turned to straight nerves for our girl, and she began saying things like, "Only four more days until the spelling bee," "37 hours from right now until the spelling bee starts," and "This time tomorrow I'll be checking in for the spelling bee."

She also began to fret aloud about her possible performance.  "What if I'm the first one out?"  "What if I misspell a word I know just because I say it wrong?"  "What if I completely mess everything up?  Why have I told so many people I was in this spelling bee?!"

Now, my answers to queries such as these were statements like, "Well, you might," and "Yes, that could happen," because when I am in similar nerve-inducing situations, that is what makes me feel better.  I play the "what if" game clear down the line:  What if I fail?  Well, I've survived worse, so I'll probably feel bad for a while and then be fine.  What if I upset everyone?  I upset people all the time.  I'll either decide I need to apologize or they'll get over themselves and stop being such thin-skinned pansies.  (I am often not a very nice person inside my own head.)  I will What If to the metaphorical death. (What if I die?  "O death, where is thy sting?"  Hey, still fine!)

Somehow, somehow this turned out to be not the most comforting thing for our scared daughter to hear, but thankfully I married a man whose face gives me helpful visual cues; in this instance after I said to her, "Well, yeah, you might be the first person out," his face turned to me and managed to communicate What is wrong with you? with no words at all, because he is very talented.  Then he told her that she would not be the first person out, and that she was going to do great, because she is a fantastic speller, and other reassuring and comforting things that she apparently needed to hear, and thank God she has a dad is what I am saying.


The morning of the bee she was still nervous, but manageably so, I think in part because we were busy making sure we had all our baked goods in order to turn in to the foods barn at the fair (and oh, isn't that a story for another day), and then we were walking around, and getting delicious food like corn dogs and cheese curds and such.  Caedmon demonstrates how seriously we take this food in the photo below, double-fisting food on a stick.

And then it was time to head for the spelling bee.

Adelaide had been pretty clingy all morning, hanging on me and squeezing me at regular intervals, and thankfully by that time I'd learned to simply squeeze back and keep my big trap shut.  When we walked in, though, she put on a brave face, found her chair, and sat herself down, leaving the rest of us to find seats and watch all the other contestants and their families file in.  I realized very quickly that I was not going to handle the experience well, and communicated my feelings to my mother via text before Adelaide had even spelled her first word.

I'm assuming most of you have attended a spelling bee or similar event at some point in your lives, so I won't give you a blow-by-blow of the event, but I will say it started with a full room and 81 chairs for the hopeful spelling contestants,

and involved much squirming and clenching and anxiety on my part.  Derek put his feelings to good use via social media, where he gave live updates on Facebook so people could follow along, and when I looked back over his feed it was so entertaining.  I might try to get it all on here tomorrow, to give you a different perspective of the experience.

Adelaide ended up spelling word after word after word right, and really, most of the words were easily within her spelling abilities.  The only two words I worried about were "conscience" ("Please, please God tell me she knows it's spelled con-science, con-science... YES!  She knows!") and "indebtedness" (Surely she knows the root word is "debt," surely she knows that... if I hear her say the letter "b" I'll know that she knows what she's doing.... YES!  She knows!").  I also half-regretted telling her to take her time, not hurry, because it would be a shame to misspell a word simply because she rushed through it.  She did take her time spelling each word, but that also gave me time to have a mini-stroke in between each letter, I swear.

And then, after two hours of spelling, she won.

I'll be back tomorrow to talk about more of the details of the day's experiences, because you know one post is not enough to contain all the words I have for this event.  For now, suffice it to say:  We were so proud, not just because she won, but because she had the guts to get up there and try even though it was nerve-wracking and hard, and at the end of the day we had to tell her that no, she was not allowed to sleep with her trophy, but it could absolutely stay in her room with her.

Testing My Ability to Ruin Anything

We are T minus 20 days to the Iowa State Fair.  This is important and glorious news for those of us who feel this way about corn dogs:

And when your whole family feels this way about corn on the cob:

Why, yes, that is Caedmon at the Iowa State Fair, five years ago, not quite one year old.  Be still, my corn- and baby-loving heart.


I entered a number of items in our sad, local county fair a couple years after moving to Iowa, and while I won first place in open class for my cookies and placed in a few other categories, as it turned out, they don't give out ribbons here, but instead stickers that merely look like ribbons.  See?  Sad.

So this year, I began looking into entering items into the state fair- the huge, gigantic, competitive Iowa State Fair.  The one that has more than 65,000 entries per year, according to the fair's website.

That information kind of scared me away- I mean, I know I make a decent cookie, but against 65,000 other people who also believe in their cookie-making abilities?  Yeesh.

I then, however, made the mistake of calling my grandma, who was all "Wonderful!  Yes!  You should do it!"  And then an envelope arrived in the mail from her a scant two days later containing entry money for Adelaide, so that she, too, could take part in the madness.

So we've been practicing.  I even went out and bought a cookie scoop, so you know I mean business.

Really, though, I have zero expectations for this whole fair-entry-competition experience.  We're in it to try something new, and to stretch ourselves a bit, plus it's a handy excuse to spend more time at the fair.  I am determined not to let myself freak out about any of it, and to treat it as an excuse to have fun, and be adventuresome!  Sooooo basically suppress my whole personality.

What could go wrong?

The Speller

Adelaide is all in a tizzy today because

She's been waiting for months for this letter, informing her that yes, her dreams have come true, she gets to participate in the Iowa State Fair spelling bee next month.  Day after day, trotting out to the mailbox, only to be disappointed by a notable paucity in spelling bee-related letters- until today.

For whatever reason, our schools don't have their own spelling bees, which is a problem when you have a daughter whose favorite game is, "Give me a word to spell!"  Now she finally gets a chance to have a stranger with a microphone give her many difficult words to spell while she stands on a stage in front of large state fair crowds.  I have not described the experience in quite this way to her, which is probably why she's still looking forward to it.

When she hasn't been obsessively checking the mailbox- giving me the opportunity to crow, "No post on Sundays!" an average of, oh, say once a week?- Adelaide has been, among other things, volunteering at our local library.  She was excited to begin several weeks ago, but I wondered how long this job would hold its charm for her; I was a little afraid she was expecting hours of reading, rather than whatever tasks actually need doing.

The first day, I picked her up after an hour and she was so dang excited.  "Mom, it was awesome!  I got to shelve books, and dust, and spent a long time denewstickering!  I want to stay longer next time!"  After I ascertained that she had peeled "New!"stickers off of no-longer-new books, among other things, I answered that, yes, she could stay longer next time, as long as the librarians really did have things for her to do and she wasn't underfoot.  A month later, she still loves it.

See?  Not walking but running toward her volunteer hours at the library.

Eldest child has rounded out her summer by playing with her brothers like they're her favorite people in the world, except for the times she's engaging in what appears to be a fight to the death with them.  She's well-rounded like that.

The Things, We Have Been Doing Them

As usual, our family has been doing all sorts of Very Important Things lately, such as:


Cutting our hair into mohawks:

It's actually "mohawk" singular, as the rest of us decided against a single strip of hair across the top of our scalps.  Not every Crisler is as fierce as the Atticus, and I mean "fierce" in a very Project Runway sense of the word.  (Dear Husband:  I promise not to mention PR again in this post.  You may read on without fear.)  And no, I have no shame over watching Project Runway (whoops- sorry, Derek):  It's like the 4-H Style Reviews I competed in every summer growing up, except with fewer sunflower dresses, crueler judges, but about the same amount of histrionics.  (People who know my mom:  You should absolutely ask her about that year a girl won Grand Champion with a dress my mom knew in her bones she didn't make herself.  My mother is the absolute opposite of a stereotypical stage mom, but even now that girl's name hisses through mom's teeth like she's talking about the antichrist.  Give how even-keel she usually is, it is completely hilarious.)

We went to the Iowa State Fair last weekend, which we attend almost exclusively for the food.  Family favorites this year:

Derek:  Jumbo Chili Cheese Dog; Cheese Curds

Kristy: Cheese Curds; Giant Soft Pretzel covered in Chocolate, Slivered Almonds, and Sea Salt; Caramel Apple

Adelaide:  Cheese curds; Caramel Apple Sundae; Honey Lemonade, 

Atticus:  "Every food."

Caedmon:  Cheese Curds, Honey Lemonade

Fried peanut butter and jelly on a stick.  It was... okay.  Just okay.

Iowa friends, feel free to skip the Fried Apple Pie on a Stick and the Mexican Grilled Sweet Corn, as both were dismally disappointing.

I've let entirely too many posts go by recently without a single flower pic.  Forgive us our trespasses:

Hello, hydrangeas.  You make August beautiful.

And lastly, this has had me laughing for days at random, often inconvenient times.

Squirt, Idiots, and Tasty, Tasty Meat

Sorry for the radio silence, guys.  We've been gone and busy and whatever other excuse you want to concoct on my behalf.  The good news is, all the stuff we've been busy with has given me plenty of bloggy fodder!  You can expect more posts this week unless I forget, get busy again, or just don't feel like it.  (WHO'S EXCITED?)


Last Saturday our little family visited the Iowa State Fair along with Derek's parents, his sister and her family, and half the population of the upper Midwest.

One of the very first things we saw was Squirt.

Who is Squirt?  Why, he's a 3,032-pound bull, of course.

One of the great things about having grandparents come with you to the fair is that there's someone else for Atticus to ask uncomfortable questions like, "What are those things hanging from the bottom of the bull?"

Squirt was this year's Biggest Bull.  Raise your hand if you love that a massive bull is named "Squirt."

The biggest boar's name was a little less ironic but equally delightful.

Otis!  Otis is a 4 1/2 year old, 1,103-pound boar from Buffalo Center, Iowa.  I wanted to lay Caedmon down next to him so you'd have a basis for comparison, size-wise, but Cade wasn't having it.  Neither was Derek.

Next up was Abraham Lincoln made out of butter.  Mr. President can cross that one off his bucket list.  Except that he's dead.  And I'm guessing they didn't have bucket lists in the mid-1800's.  Whatever.

And here we have the butter cow, pre-desecration:

That's right, I wrote "pre-desecration."  Because some idiot- or rather, an organized group of idiots- decided that they would garner a little publicity for their animal rights' group by covering the butter cow in red paint and smearing the words "Freedom For All" on her glass enclosure Sunday night after the building was closed.  It's incredible how angry I am over this, but rather than giving those astonishingly imbecilic people more of my time and words, I'll just say that I decided Beef really is what's for dinner.  Every night this week. 

Speaking of the sudden urge to eat as much animal flesh as possible:

Adelaide went head-to-head (or rather head-to-thigh) on a gigantic turkey leg.  With a little help from her family, she emerged victorious.  And really full.

I had me some Caedmon for lunch:

The 4-H building housed countless gems, of course.  My favorites this year:  A restored antique ice box...

I can't even put into words how much I love this thing.

...a wheel barrow fairy garden...

...and a cake whose idea I'm pretty sure was stolen from me.

4-H'ers cake at the Iowa State Fair...

...the cake we made.

I've decided to let it slide.  This time.

And of course no Fair post would be complete without a photo of one of the kids who passed out after a mere 7 hours of Fair fun.