The Spelling Bee

Seth won his class Spelling Bee, which entered him into the school wide Spelling Bee.  He kept talking about the prize, which he thought would probably be an I Pad.  I had him study the packet of words for 30 minutes every night.  Seth has a near photographic memory, so I felt like this was going to be  really easy for him.  He was motivated, he studied, it was really cute.

The big day came.  Shawn told me that he had to move heaven and earth to get out of the hospital and down to the school, and I had gone out price shopping on Christmas items and completely lost track of time.  Shawn called me 10 minutes before the Bee saying “Where are You?”  I totally pulled out the “Pregnancy Brain” card, and miraculously arrived only 2 minutes after it started.

Apparently I missed a typical Seth moment.   He got up to the microphone and  said “My name is Seth McAffee.  I am in 3rd grade.  But you all know me as Setho.”  This made people laugh (I think his nickname is dumb) and he basked in all that attention. 

Then it started, and you could feel the tension crackling through the room.  Or maybe that was just me, because I was nervous.  The entire bee was 3rd-6th graders competing against each other.  That seemed like a stacked deck for the upper grades.

Seth was #4.  His first word was “scent”.  He paused then asked:  “There are two homonyms that are scent.  Do you mean cent as in money, or scent as in smell?”  I did a mental fist pump in the air and thought:  “My boy is a genius, ya’ll!!”  Shawn looked at me and said:  “What is he talking about?”  The correct spelling was “scent” and he got it right.  He returned to his seat and let out a really loud  “Phew!”

4-5 kids got out each time, and it was pretty apparent that the mistakes were due to nerves.  I felt so bad for each kid who heard the buzzer after their turn. 

His next two words were “glimpse” and “virtue”.  Easy-peasy.
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Finally, it was down to the top 10.  Seth was the last 3rd grader up there, and his word was “vegetarian”.  Shawn groaned and Seth got started.  He ended up spelling “veterinarian” perfectly, but it was the wrong word, so he was buzzed.  At the end of the round, when the teacher came to collect him off the stage, he started arguing with her, and I took off waddling to the stage as fast as I could get there.  No huge tantrum took place, but Seth was clearly mad.  He kept telling me that he had spelled it right, they hadn’t heard him correctly and they just didn’t want a 3rd grader to win.  I see that sportsmanship is a topic to work on with him.

We watched the remainder of the Bee and it ended up with 3 kids who went round after round without any mistakes.  They were really, really good.  The last two went out on “extrapolate” and “linguistically”.  The 6th grader who won spelled “expressionism” and “façade” to earn the trophy.  She was last years winner, too.  We also found out she is in our ward at Church…small world.

By now Seth had calmed down, and Shawn had given him enough of a Good Attitude Lecture to straighten him out.  We kept telling him that most of those other kids had been in multiple Spelling Bee’s, were older and had probably studied a lot more than he had.  He ended the day happy, and so did we. 

bIt was fun to watch, but nerve wracking as well.  I asked both Shawn and Cole if they had been spelling the words in their minds throughout the Bee, and they both said No.  I found that  so strange.  I was spelling every word along with the kids, and I thought most people were doing that too.  One more mark on my nerd tally.