The Challenge

In early November Andy and I went to a meeting about joining a Destination Imagination team.  Honestly, I don't know all the details, but the basic gist is that the kids form teams in certain age groups consisting of 2-7 kids and they choose a challenge they would like to complete from a list of about seven.  The challenges are all different and appeal to different academic and creative strengths.  There are several rules that go along with Destination Imagination, but the biggest one is that the kids have to do everything themselves.  There are parent coaches that guide the kids and help them think about different ways to do things, but in the end the kids have to do every part of it and the parents can't help.

Soon after the meeting his team was formed and they started practicing once a week.  They decided to do the "structural" challenge so had to put a plan together of what they were going to build, how they were going to build it, what materials they were going to use and so forth.  They also had to put a skit together and practice Instant Challenges, which are two random short challenges that they have to do between their skit and structure presentation where they are given a whole bunch of random things then they have to create something from in just a few minutes.  Kind of like that part in the movie "Apollo" when the people at NASA have to find a way to put a circle into a square hole with only the pieces that are available on the spaceship.

The idea behind it is awesome, but the time commitment is huge.  Okay, not so.  They practiced once a week for a few months and that was no big deal.  The time commitment the last two weeks leading up to the competition is huge.  For the past two weeks those kids practiced almost every night and this last week Charlie, who is an assistant coach, practiced instant challenges with them every morning before school.  Which meant the whole family was involved by eating early so Andy could go to practice, getting Andy to and from practice and finding all the crazy items needed to practice instant challenges.  Every night as Charlie was planning for the next morning it was "do we have any pipe cleaners and where are they?", "do we have any paper plates and where do we keep them?", "where are the ping pong balls?", "do we have any brown paper bags?", etc.

Everything came down the the final competition on Saturday and then a snow storm was predicted and they cancelled (or postponed) it.  All that work and they didn't even get to complete.  That was disappointing and not knowing when they are going to reschedule is a little unsettling, but the good thing is that we now had an entire weekend with no plans and a lot of snow coming down outside.

So, we had a nice pancake breakfast, which we do most Saturday mornings, and then decided on a family game of Monopoly.  Of course we had to set a no crying rule before we started (mostly for Sarah), but with a lot of help from Charlie it wasn't an issue anyway because Sarah kicked everybody's butt big time.  After our game Charlie went outside with the kids to shovel and build a snowman and then when they came in we all snuggled down in the basement and watched a movie.  This morning we took the girls to swim class and on the way home noticed a bunch of people sledding at the high school down the street from our house so we went home and changed and then took the kids sledding.  Then we went out to lunch and took the kids to play at the gym.

By the end of the day the kids were sick of each other which designated to us that we had a very good family weekend.  A lot of work all week to get to this point, but in the end it was worth it because I know the kids aren't going to forget Monopoly, snowman building and sledding anytime soon.