Bring on the battle!!!

It was ugly. There literally was blood. There was sweat....(TMI) and at some points in the game, there were tears.

 I feel like I came out a winner though. I spent 2 days... TWO DAYS in stadium seating with a 1 year old. It was the most stressful weekend I have had in a long time.  I am here to tell you I earned a trip to WORLDS to compete with other mothers and their one year olds.  I feel pretty confident about my chances to win at worlds in St Louis MO. Wish me luck. I will accept donations if you would like to sponsor me. Oh, wait. I should be talking about ROBOTS! As I have mentioned before, Jakob and Keith are on a robotics team. They had 6 weeks to design and build a robot to compete against other robots for ultimate world domination!!!! Ok, maybe not world domination, but it was pretty exciting. Here is a great picture of the entire team. (thanks Fox family)

 We were at the Maverick Center competing with other robots from all over the western United States and a team from Canada. I affectionately call them "the babies from up north, eh?" I digress. Here is team Protoype X (our team) being awesome.

Keith said for the most part, these were a great group of boys. He really enjoyed working with them.

Keith also said that the day was very stressful for him between matches, but during a match he was in the zone coaching and that was when he felt the most calm. I however was a nervous wreck every time they took the field. Here is a view of the field.

You know its serious when the cotton candy guy is walking around the stadium.  That means this was a REAL sporting event... minus the alcohol.

 On the other side of the field, there were stations for each of the robot teams. We were allowed to go down in the "pits" and see them working on the robots.  Here are a few "pit" pictures.

 In reality, Kate and the other kids were SO WELL BEHAVED considering we were there for the better part of 2 days straight.  They were long days. The kids all had fun and really enjoyed themselves. There was lots of time to visit with friends and cheer on "Daddy's bo-bot".

The girls enjoyed some line dancing and cheer leading. It was just such a fun place to be!

Here are some pictures of Jakob driving the robot, or getting things ready to go on the field.

This is the actual robot. It was a great machine. A couple of times it got a mind of its own and went haywire. Keith said they learned that they needed to reboot its brain after every few matches.  Good thing to remember going into finals. They learned a lot and hopefully that will help them in April.

 

 AND SCORE!!!!

 Coach Keith is AWESOME!!!  I think he is the best coach ever and perfect for this job. He helped mentor these kids in engineering and design. He is so great with these kids. He lost his voice and still can't talk very well... but it was so worth it!

Here is some inside information for you. I share this because I want you to know, but I also want to remember.  During one of their last matches, the playing was pretty rough. Our poor little robot got beat up pretty bad. It was really bad actually. Keith had told his team captain to let the judges know that we would not be able to compete any more. Just as the team captain was headed off, one of the boys, Clark, said stop. All the boys followed with a few tools a lot of determination to get their robot back on the field.  A team on the opposition (THE BAD GUY) gave us their time out so we would have time to make needed repairs. It was ugly.  Our track got knocked out. Without our track, the robot couldn't move and we were dead. GAME OVER.  Another team came to Keith (someone we beat) and said they had a guy that was a "track expert" and he fixed our robot in no time at all.  Yea for awesome people doing amazing things!

We came in 2nd but thought we lost the chance to go to world. It was disappointing. We hung all our hopes on this one award... the chairmans award.  If you get this award, you can get a special invitation to go to world anyway. We crossed our fingers and toes and prayed.  We did not get the chairmans award.  It was so disappointing. Instead we got the "Engineering Inspiration Award".  Ya, this award gives you a special invitation to world AND PAYS for you to go!!  Holy robots! You could see the ripple of excitement as the news spread through the team.  It took us a bit to realize this was a bigger blessing than we had hoped for!