Mission Accomplished

Ever since Emily won a trophy for her reflections entry last year, Ben and Elise have wanted one of their own. The reflections program is supposed to be about getting in touch with your artistic side, and developing your talents, and blah, blah, blah, but really they were just in it for the trophies. Quite frankly, so was I. I know that kids need to learn that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and life isn’t fair and all that jazz. However, one downside of having kids so close together in age is that a lot of the time they are competing against each other. We’ve had quite a bit of sibling rivalry in this house over the past few months, and I wasn’t looking forward hearing all about how “I never win” and “she wins everything.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to. The stars aligned and all three kids came home happy with their cool new trophies. Phew.


The theme this year was “Diversity Means . . .”. Ben spent all summer taking pictures of different kinds of clouds and made a collage of his favorites. He got some cool photos on our trip, and he even got a shot of a funnel cloud from our backyard. His collage turned out great and he was pretty sure it would win. It didn’t. Luckily, he decided to throw together a literature entry a couple of days before the projects were due. It did win. He wrote about diverse ecosystems. I’m glad he found a way to put some of his random Planet Earth knowledge to good use.



Emily entered for literature, photography, and for visual arts. Her drawing was by far her best project and the one that earned her a trophy. She went with a biodiversity theme. She spent lots of time getting it just right and the finished product was very nice. I loved how she patterned each of the letters after one of the animals/plants. I wasn’t so sure that she would win. There are always lots of entries for visual arts and now that she is in third grade, she is in the division with older kids. I was proud of her for holding her own with the big kids.




Elise really wanted to win a trophy, but she only wanted to do two projects. Nate helped her set up a tripod and she took a bunch of pictures of Abby making different faces. Her project turned out really cute, but it wasn’t a winner. I had heard that no one ever enters the music category, so I told her that maybe she should make up a song. She hasn’t taken piano lessons yet and doesn’t have any real skill, but she sat down at the piano and composed a little song on a 3x5 card (with her own unique musical notation). Going with the diversity theme, she played it through once slow and low and once high and fast. It wasn’t good. I was just banking on her being the only one to enter. I was a little worried when I found out that three kids entered the music category in her age division this year. She lucked out and scored a trophy anyway. Ironically, only one girl entered a literature project. She could have written anything and won. Live and learn.