Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Duke TIP Awards

In January (his birthday, to be exact), Benjamin took the SAT's as a part of Duke's talent search. He complained and complained, but we forced him to do it. When the scores came back, it was obvious why. He scored well enough to earn state recognition. On Thursday, we traveled to University of Florida to receive his award. We began with a tour of the campus. After an hour long tour, we had seen about 10% of the campus - a perfect time to give him our "small college" infomercial.



We knew two other recipients - Bailey (Jonathan's teacher's daughter) and Abby, who was in play group with Benjamin when they were infants.






There were about 600 recipients, so it felt like a graduation of sorts. The presenter botched many of the names, including his, depsite my phonetic spelling that I sent.

Jonathan's Soccer Team

This spring Jonathan wanted to sign up for soccer. He's never played an organized sport, but he really wanted to do soccer. We signed him up at the Y. He had practice once a week and then games on Saturday - a good schedule for someone with two siblings who also have activities.


Well, it turns out that soccer really isn't Jonathan's thing. He doesn't have an aggressive bone in his body, and that doesn't go well with soccer. He tends to back away from the ball instead of going toward it. He also isn't very competitive, which is good since his team only won one game in the 8 game season. He was happy just sitting on the sidelines with his friends. Maybe it would have been better if the teams were smaller. There were 14 on his team, so there were often 4 sitting out at a time. Most games he only played half the time.


He did enjoy it, but says he wants to try something else next year. Maybe we'll try baseball...

Kick!



He liked playing goalie - not as much running!




Looks like he's going after the ball here - one of the few times he actually touched the ball.




Cubs Game!

We went to the Cubs game last night. Sweetwater Elementary sang the National Anthem. Benjamin's baseball team got to stand out in the field for the Anthem.

He stood with the infielders.

Coming in afterwards





Alexander did one of the games between innings. His team won.