Whirlwind Weekend

We are finally back home after spending the last three days in St. Louis for the robotics championships.  It was a quick busy trip, and we are pooped, but so happy we went.  PS left at 1:00 am Wednesday morning, and we followed after picking up TT and SS from school on Wednesday afternoon.

The Hotel

This is the TripAdvisor review I wish I could write.  We stayed in one of the swankier hotels in St. Louis, only because DH works for a REIT that happens to own the hotel and we got a fantastic rate. (Thus the reason I can't actually publicly post a review.) Anyway, to get the great rate, DH had to email someone in the hotel's management office and let him know exactly what we needed.  I saw the email--it said two adults and two kids.

When we arrived at 1:00 am Thursday morning,  we were given a king suite with a pull-out sofa.  Except that there was no room to actually fold out the sofa due to a massive piece of furniture sitting opposite the sofa. They said. "oh, we only had one person on the reservation."  And you didn't see 4 of us walk in? After much discussion, we were upgraded to a larger king suite on the club floor.  Yay! But by the time we finally got to bed it was 2:00 am.  Not a great start to our stay.

We were up early the next day and headed out to the robotics competition--not fully recovered from the long journey and late night.  It was after 9 when we got back to our hotel Friday night and we promptly showered and crashed.  And then, at 10:45, I was awakened from a dead sleep by music so loud that it was literally shaking the windows in our room and I could hear every word of every song ("Last Dance with Mary Jane," "Sweet Home Alabama"...) We called the front desk and we're told, "we'll see what we can do, there's a prom going on two floors above you." WTF? Obviously Swanky Hotel regularly hosts similar events.  Are they usually loud enough to shake the windows of their club level guests? I can't imagine.  Ambient noise I could have tolerated, but this was so loud it could have been right next door.  Fortunately, they shut it down within about half an hour.  I got the impression we weren't the only ones complaining.

And then last night, about 11:30 there was some crazy noise like a giant chain being dragged across the roof that, again, awakened us.  Even the kids heard that one. Fortunately it was short lived. All of this was annoying for us.  I would have been livid if I had paid the rack rate (nearly $300/night). Unacceptable for a hotel of the caliber it proclaims to be. 

The City

I'm kind of "eh" about St. Louis.  I didn't love it.  Traffic wasn't bad, but it has all these crazy loops and u-turns to get on and off the highways that made me feel like I was always driving in circles. 

We visited the Arch.  Knock that off the bucket list. Not that exciting.

We visited the City Museum.  That was exciting.  The kids decided it was the awesomest "museum" they have ever visited, and we practically had to drag them out of there. It's not really a museum. It's really a giant maze made up of enormous sculptures, architectural elements and industrial leftovers.  For instance, there is a giant "slinky" kids can climb through that is made from an old refrigeration coil from the Budweiser plant.  I really don't know how to describe this place, but for kids who like to climb and explore it is pretty freaking amazing.  One caveat is that I would have been a nervous wreck when my kids were smaller because there is really no way to keep up with them.  At age 11--and having two of them--I felt pretty comfortable letting them explore on their own with specified meeting times.

We also visited Fitz's Rootbeer, a restaurant in an old bottling factory that still bottles while you watch.  The food was decent and it was fun.  It's on Delmar Street (I think) which was a nice little shopping district.  We found a cool book store and comic book store, and I bought the girls finger narwhals in a little giftshop.

OMG ROBOTS!

The robotics competition did not disappoint.  There were 400 teams competing at our level (FRC), plus who knows how many teams competing at lower levels (like lego robotics)  for younger kids. At FRC there were teams from Israel, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada (and those are just the ones I know about!)  Needless to say, there were a lot of kids there, and it's just one huge party.

On the first day PS texted us "I just met some Canadians that are in the Archimedes division who were super duper nice and gave me chocolate that's illegal in America because of a choking hazard.  Today has been cool!"

I let my daughter go off to a nerd convention, and she mixes with crazy Canadians who introduce her to illicit chocolate! They obviously know her drug of choice. She had a fantastic time--although I think we saw about 5 minutes of her the entire trip--she was always running, running, running. (We sat with several other team parents and when they found out who we belonged to, every single one said, "Oh, PS!  We love her!")

Their team did great at the competition.  We made it through the quarter finals and lost in the semifinals.*  Our team is very young in the robotics world and this was only the second trip to nations and the first time making the finals.  The goal was to make it to finals (and therefore help establish our cred in robot world), and they were thrilled to make it that extra step. Definitely a worthwhile trip!

*****

*Ok, if you really want to know how this works... Each team gets 8 qualification matches. During the qualification matches, the robots are randomly assigned to teams of 3 (your "alliance") and have 3 on 3 game play.  Your win/loss is based on the total points for your entire alliance--so much depends on the robots you are paired with and those you compete against--and teams are ranked individually by their win/loss record.

After all of the qualification matches, the top 8 teams are automatically in the finals.  But then each of the top 8 gets to pick the alliance that it wants to go to the finals with.  Often the top teams pair together, which opens up spots for the next highest ranked teams.  So 24 total robots go to finals, in alliances of 3.

We were ranked 19th, but were a first round pick by the #5 seed team.  It was seriously huge that we were picked so early. Of course, rankings don't tell the whole story because so much depends on how others perform, and I guess the #5 seed saw this.

After alliance selections, it goes to a double-elimination bracket system for finals. Since we were the 5th alliance we played the 4th alliance and won.  Then it was down to 4 teams and we played the #1 seed and lost.  The winner of the top 2 in our division went to the "Einstein Division" which was the top team from each division (since there are 400 teams, they were divided into 4 divisions), and the winner of our division made it to the very end and lost (to the Canadians, so PS was very happy for them!) Maybe there really is something to that chocolate!

Ch-ch-ch--ch-changes

My doctor has informed me that I need to go on the South Beach Diet.  Just got labs back and my triglycerides were way too high.  Yay.

Frankly, I would have been far happier if he had told me to go vegetarian.  I can live without meat, but oh, how I love my carbs.  I guess that's what got me into this situation in the first place.  Bread, pasta, rice, potatoes--I love it all.  I also love a cupcake as much as the next girl, but I have enough sense to keep the sweet stuff out of the house.  The pasta and potatoes are the real problem.

I would love to blow this off as a fluke, but  this was a retest with the same high-tri result.  Not to mention that both my dad and brother have diabetes, and there seems to be some connection between high-triglycerides and diabetes. Since I really do not want to go down that path, I guess we'll give this a whirl.

The first two weeks of South Beach require cold-turkey elimination of all carbs and sugar.  Supposedly this is supposed to regulate blood sugar and eliminate cravings. This is tough--especially since I'm not a big veggie eater. I've been searching for recipes without much luck. Half of what is out there is sweets made with artificial sweeteners.  This doesn't seem to comport with the goals of regulating blood sugar and reducing cravings, since multiple studies say that artificial sweeteners trigger the same cravings and blood sugar swings as real sugar. And I've been trying to move away from processed foods and more toward whole foods--artificial sweeteners are just another processed food.

I've had better luck just adapting my own recipes. So far it's not too bad--it just takes a lot of planning to make sure that I have the rights kind of food at work. But I'm glad this phase is short, because there is a lot of redundancy and there is no way it would work in the long term (and I don't even want to think about the havoc being wrecked on my cholesterol levels, with all the dairy, meat and cheese.)

Ugh!

TT texted me after school today that she had a note saying that her science teacher had resigned "for personal reasons." Of course this made me immediately suspicious.  Teachers are under contract--they don't just leave in the middle of the year unless something has happened. 

I told DH after I met this guy for the first time that he gave off a pedophile vibe.  Not very PC, but there was just something "off" about him. He was new to the school--the only sixth grade teacher that PS hadn't already had. Of course, there's not much you can do about an instinct.  Be vigilant. Limit out-of-class contact. Have the inappropriate touching talk--a lot.

So when I got TT's text, the first thing I did was google court records.  Nothing popped up, though. And then, within an hour, I had a text from the mom rumor mill saying that he had allegedly been touching girls' hair and the police had questioned him. 

Once I got home I tried to not-too-obviously question the twins.  TT said "he's creepy," which she had said before.  And then she told me that one of her friends had told her that he had rubbed her upper thigh when she went in for help after school.  I lectured her and SS on why they hadn't told me or another grown-up about that incident and I grilled them about whether he had ever touched them in a way that made them uncomfortable.  They swear he did not, and I believe them.  I don't think they have the personalities of typical targets, and they had already told me that they didn't really like him (and they love most of their teachers.)

Maybe I shouldn't give much credence to the rumor mills, but my gut instinct plus TT's story today lead me to believe there's some veracity there.  I just hope he was found out before it got any further than what we already know about.

Friday Fun

So I finally had my endoscopy.  I have esophageal ulcers and a smallish hiatal hernia. I feel so validated, finally having a diagnosis.  But apparently esophageal ulcers are somewhat rare and often caused by over-consumption of alcohol.  So now I'm afraid my docs will think I'm a lush.  Great, since I have a couple of drinks a couple of times a month and I've only been drunk enough for a hangover twice in my entire life.

So the doc is changing up my meds and there may be another invasive procedure and possibly surgery in the future.  Yay.

In other news, we've been busy, busy, busy, with spring sports now in full swing. We have a meeting or practice or event every night of the week.  I'm so ready for the summer slowdown. Last night we ended up with a rare family night together.  Usually the kids are going in three different directions. But PS has to see a live show for her theater class by next week and we were planning to go on Saturday while the twins were at a Girl Scout event, but the show was sold out on Saturday so she bailed on robotics on Friday and we all went together.

We we went to our favorite tiny theater to see a "popcorn-throwing melodrama."  We've taken PS before, but never SS and TT (sometimes the shows aren't kid appropriate), who thought any place where you get to throw popcorn and not get in trouble is pretty much the awesomest place ever. We were seated literally 1 foot from the stage and had great fun. (One of the actors gave us a thumbs up after one of the kids landed a piece of popcorn in his mouth--yes this is not only allowed, it is encouraged.) It was the first time in a while we all got to hang together as a family, with nobody whining about being bored or wishing she were somewhere else.  These days are becoming increasingly rare, with the kids' social calendars getting fuller  by the year.

PS

Sooooo, PS did pass her geometry test.  Not exactly with flying colors, but by enough to bring her overall grade to passing.  Of course, passing isn't exactly the standard of success in our house, so she is still under restrictions until she has at least a B. But as long as she passes this grading period, she will be able to go to the robotics finals in St. Louis. (She still has to toe the line, another bad grade will sink her.)

At least we now have a plan and a tutor in place who can help her out the rest of the year.  And she hopefully now realizes that she has to focus a little more on math and a little less on robotics.