More insanity

For Dance Festival, the 12 and 13 year old boys are dancing to High School Musical, Get Your Head in the Game.
This is a random sampling of the boys. It is representative of all boys this age. . .

So, it was a really great idea to try to teach them to dance and dribble a basketball at the same time. . .

The boys loved it. Every practice, basketballs were thrown, flung, kicked, and lobbed all directions, and women kept yelling, "Boys, Hold your balls!" None of the boys ever laughed at that. . .

And as it turns out, when you combine a google of boys with a google of basketballs, none of the boys hold their balls at all. Rather, they lob them quite firmly at other boys' faces. And, well, balls.

But thankfully, the Dance Festival coordinators took into account how immature a horde of 12 and 13 year old boys can be and gave them costumes that can't be used against them by the other boys. . .

Oh wait. My mistake. They all have elastic waisted shorts on. In that case, hold your balls and let the depantsing begin. . .

Insanity

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Which, by definition, makes me insane. This comes as a surprise to exactly no one.

But just to confirm it, today I let Rebi buy another point and shoot camera. Because the destruction of the previous one was so much fun, I'm dying to relive it. Over and over again. Wait. If I expect the same results, am I still insane?

I don't think I want you to answer that. I certainly don't want you to provide examples to prove your point.

Dance Festival

I haven't posted much about dance festival, because it's one of those things that is too big to wrap my brain around. It's 3500+ kids doing 6 or 8 dances. Lots of practices. Lots of mistakes. Lots of funny things, but difficult to condense into a few blog posts.

So, let me share a little bit of what happened last Saturday.

For months, the kids have been practicing here, learning the routines in groups of 50-100, depending on the dance. This week, it was time for them to get together with everyone else dancing their same dance and coordinating all of the formations and such. We did this in Riverside, on a high school field. And it was hot.

They spent the first 2 and 1/2 hours standing on Astroturf trying to figure out the intro dance, and were eventually released to sit with their groups under the shade for some cooling down. As the kids filtered back in, it was clear that Evan was not in good shape. Several of the kids let me know he had a headache, his stomach hurt, and he was looking bad. His arms also hurt from having immunizations the day before. So, we plopped him on the cool grass, soaked his clothes with cold water, and made him start drinking up. Within about an hour, he still had a headache, but his skin was much cooler to the touch and he seemed to be perking back up.

And then he went to the bathroom, which was a couple of blocks away, through the sun.

I found him, slumped against the bathroom wall, out in the sun, pale as a ghost and shaking. I took him to the first aid tent, where they had buckets of ice water, and rags to soak him with.

The first thing they did was stripped him of as much clothing as possible, so there Evan sat, 1500 girls passing by, flexing his abs for all he was worth. Which was good. It told me we didn't need an ambulance or anything. . .

But I did feel it necessary to tell him that if he really wanted to impress the ladies, he should probably think about peeling the matching Tweety Bird band aids off each arm.

Surfing Pics

Serious. And addicted.

What a surfer.

"Maybe I'll wait for the next one. . ."

Paddling out to where the waves were cresting (sadly the other photos of Ellie didn't turn out).

Tyler headed back down the beach to catch some waves.

"Are you sure I can't try? I don't have a cast yet. . . and my butt crack isn't exposed."