A Spark!

Sometimes you just know you are on to something when you look into your child's eyes.

Earlier this fall, we asked AH what he wanted to be involved in outside of homeschool. Scouts? No. Football? No. We went through a list a mile long. Nothing seemed to interest him. He is a homebody, as I've said before, and it is important to us that he have some regular interaction with other people! AH asked me about an electric car "club" that I had mentioned earlier in the week. I was pretty sure it had filled up, but emailed the organizer. It was full, but she put AH on the wait list. I was sure we were out of luck, but a few days later we were in! It is called BEST. Each week we meet to work on small electric cars that the kids design and build. We will do this until after Christmas when the kids start designing and building a larger electric vehicle to compete against other teams.

We had missed a couple of weeks by joining late and I was feeling overwhelmed and lost (I know nothing of electricity or cars!!) during one of our meetings. We were trying to figure out how the motor would turn the axle. Where should we mount it, what would we use? I looked around the room at the group of kids each working with their respective parents. They seemed to know what they were doing. I was thinking that I couldn't help AH with this, and how I was a failure as a homeschool mom, when he turned to me in the middle of this problem, his eyes bright and shining and said to me, "This is so fun!" It didn't matter to him that we were stuck. In retrospect, I was probably the only one who thought that. Thank goodness I'm learning to keep my mouth shut and my opinions to myself. He eventually worked out a solution for himself with a little push in the right direction from our experts.

We worked on his car today in anticipation of our meeting tomorrow. He figured out how to attach the battery to the switch and motor. His eyes lit up again today! He's got a game plan and a list of things to buy for his car. Tomorrow will be a great day!

(I'm having computer trouble and need to install some software onto our 2nd computer in order to upload pictures to my blog. My apologies. I would do it now, but it's after midnight and I should rest. I'll upload tomorrow night. ~Barbara)