Congratulations to my son for winning the 2009 local Geography Bee!

The medal actually comes from the National Geography Bee in Washington DC.  At the link is a quiz for you to see where you stand!  ;)

The local contests are competed in individual schools.  Because he is homeschooled, he competed with area homeschoolers from our city. 

     Since he won the school level competition, he got to stay and take a written test.  The winner from each school takes this 70 question test to qualify for the state competition in April. The best are chosen.  He won last year too, but did not qualify for state.  This year he thinks he did better on the written exam.  I told him that makes sense.  He's had another year to learn more geography and he now has experience under his belt.  =)  We'll know in March whether he qualifies for state. The winner of the state competition goes on to Washington DC in May. 

     This year my daughter, the real geography expert of the family, was too old to compete.  She has a lot of high school work and is trying to finish The Scarlet Letter.  I had costumes to sew for our next unit celebration  in 2 weeks.  My husband retired from the USAF last week and has been bored out of his gourd in between looking for companies to send his resume to.  So I asked him if he'd take our son to the competition.  I am usually a nervous wreck at the competition.  This year I was a wreck at home!  

     When the guys left, I asked them to tell me everything when they got back. But now they can only remember bits and pieces of a couple of the questions. It's okay. I can't share the questions anyway on the blog until all the schools complete the bees.  However I was intensely curious as to how they matched up with our studies.

     Usually we celebrate by going to my son's favorite restaurant, Red Lobster. Since my husband is job searching, we are cutting back on our budget.  But we did have grilled steak, fully loaded baked potatoes, spinach salad with feta cheese and kalamata olives, and sauteed mushrooms.  For dessert we had chocolate satin pie!  The steak dinner was originally to celebrate my husband's retirement last week, but his mom kept taking us out to eat. We were going places everyday and I was so tired when we were at home.  So it made a nice celebration dinner for the bee.  It was still pretty special and sooooo much cheaper than eating out! To further celebrate, my son asked if we could watch a movie, even though it is a school night.  Wellll, I relented and he got a big grin and picked "Homeward Bound."  

     In the meantime, my husband said he got a phone call from the Pentagon while he was at the Bee.  He had interviewed with them on Christmas Eve and that has been the only nibble.  He has run into so many closed doors here in Texas, even at the military bases.  Unfortunately, the cell phone was off and by the time he saw the message, the guy had gone home.  So we'll probably have a sleepless night while awaiting our fate.