May 4, 2013 - Beach Cleanup for Connect1NG

Through my work's Connect1NG, we volunteered to cleanup the beach this wonderful day!  There was a lot of trash to pickup and we got to play with a crab.  Later that night after church, we went and got some frozen yogurt at Menchi's.

October 6, 2012 Championship Volleyball & Swim Meet

Today we had a busy day.  Kaylyn had her last volleyball game, and if they won this game, they played in the championship game right after.  Well, they won their game, so they played Holy Trinity for the championship.  The lost that game, but their team got a runner-up trophy!  I could see the kids improve over the season, which was really neat.  Each time the kids got more confident, the better they played.  All it took was winning one game, and their confidence soared!  It was an awesome season.

Ashlyn and I had to leave during the championship game to volunteer our time with Face of Change.  It was a food packaging event to feed 100,000 Brevard county residents.  We packaged macroni, cheese bags and filled over 5 boxes at our table.  We volunteered our time through GEMS and it was really neat.  I stole a picture from the face of change facebook website, where we were caught in the background waiting for our table to open up to package food.

After the volunteer time, we headed over to catch Kaylyn's 2nd swim meet.  I got to see her swim in the 50 yard freestyle, where she placed 2nd among her heat.  She was so upset for not getting 1st, but she beat her time from last week, which we tried to tell her was awesome.  We have to play the game again that if she has this sort of attitude at another swim meet, we will pull her from the team.  She is way too competitive and it leads to poor sportsmanship attitude, which we will not tolerate this year.  She was getting ready to swim in the 50 yard butterfly, when the meet was halted due to thunder.  It poured and thundered for about 30 minutes, and then a flash of lightning came, so the meet was called.  They got up to event 17 though, so Kaylyn got to swim 2 of her 5 events.  Not sure if they will reschedule this meet or not.

February 18th Intro Girls to Engineering Workshop

Well, I volunteered for this SWE (Society of Women Engineers) workshop.  Kaylyn joined some of the girls from GEMS to attend this workshop and I helped with the Chocolate Asphalt workshop.  It was a lot of fun and I learned more about asphalt than I ever thought I could since I did a lot of the teaching on it.  Most of the girls were engaged and interested.  Of course, most of them wanted to each their creation right away, but they had to wait awhile for it to cool.  This workshop made me miss teaching some, but by the last class there were older girls with attitudes that reminded me why I wasn't teaching anymore ;-)  This workshop was held for 3rd through 6th graders and about 620 girls showed up, not including the volunteers.  Amazing...and the girls got to do a lot of hands on stuff and Kaylyn really seemed to enjoy it.  But she did tell me that she did not want to be an engineer, but wants to be a zookeeper :-)  I'll keep working on her!