An Author in the Making

I have been neglecting posting on here knowing that I have gotten so far behind that I didn't feel like I could ever attempt to catch up. Yes, it has been almost 1 year since my last post- sad indeed. So here is a recap of our last year in under 25 words:

Jace is in Kindergarten, Ethan is 3, Baby Boy #3 is due in May, I have a new business blog, and Tim is still working.

There, that was easy!

Really, I just felt very compelled to write a post about Jace because I am suffering from proud-parentitis right now. A few months ago Jace was watching PBS and heard an announcement for a writers contest they were holding. He immediately told me he wanted to do this, and I kept saying 'yeah, yeah' but putting it off because I knew this would require a lot of work on both our parts. Well last month, when we had 2 weeks of snow days here in VA (crazy, huh-should've posted about that too- trying not to feel guilty about it...) I finally agreed to let him write this story. So I asked him what he wanted to write about. Well, lately we have made almost a nightly ritual of watching an episode of Mythbusters with our kids on YouTube and Netflix. A few nights previously, Jace had seen the episode where Adam and Jamie build a boat out of Duck tape, sailing it successfully across the San Francisco bay and Jace thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread. So the legend of the Pirate Duck Tape Boat was born (after all, in the mind of a 6 year old no boat story is complete without a Pirate, right?). So I showed him how to write an outline(seriously, psycho mom, what Kindergartner needs to know how to write an outline?), then we headed to Walmart and got him some paper, jewels, etc. for his masterpiece. And we set to work. I would say he set to work but I will not lie- it was a lot of work for me too ("Mom, where is my eraser? Can you sharpen my pencil? Which way points North? How do you spell compass? Can you tear daddies duck tape into 100 pieces for me? My glue isn't working...)

Seriously after a few days I was secretly hoping he would just give it up. But every morning after breakfast he would pull out his box of supplies and spend hours working on this thing. Looking back it is amazing to me that he stuck with it! Over the course of 2 weeks, he must have spent 24 hours on this thing. Pretty impressive in and of itself.

So today I got a call from WHTJ in Richmond, VA, telling me that Jace had won first place in his age group in our region. SO COOL! I thought his story was great, but never imagined that he would actually win. I was sure there were just too many kids that would enter- and statistically speaking it just wasn't very likely. But I am so proud of my little guy- and I can't wait until he gets his letter in the mail tomorrow telling him he won first place. Even though I am a bit worried about him getting a big head about this, I am excited for him to learn this valuable lesson: if you really put your mind to it and work hard, you can accomplish anything! Motivational even to me. So here is his story- complete with pictures. Now I am sure he will just be crossing his fingers that he gets first place nationally so he can win his very own laptop computer (which he talks about all the time.)

Enjoy!