To Bee or Not to Bee

Mr. Crippen pulled me aside in the hall two weeks ago to tell me Lucy was the runner-up in her class Spelling Bee and that she'd be continuing on to the final round.  "I almost came and got you to watch her,"  he said.  "She was so...nervous and excited and...bouncy..."

I smiled, imagining her emotion, but didn't fully know what he meant until witnessing Wednesday's school wide Spelling Bee.  

I was anxious as ten o'clock approached.  We'd hardly had time to practice any words.  I'd thrown a few at her in the bathtub the night before and a few more on the way to school that morning.

"You'd better not win," I told her,  "I'm a horrible speller and it would make me feel bad!"
She laughed.
"Seriously," I said, feeling helpless to convey my sincerity, "I'll be so proud of you, even if you take last place!!" She smiled and nodded vigorously.  

When I walked into the gym on Wednesday, anxiety hung thick in the air.  The contestants sat on their chairs with tentative smiles.  I hugged Lucy and high-fived the others before sitting down on the front row to make goofy faces at them in desperate attempt to lighten the mood.  Those poor kids!  

The first twenty minutes were tense.  Words were spelled - and sometimes misspelled - slowly and carefully.  It was absolutely agonizing.  My heart broke for all the brilliant, brave kids fighting back tears after the disappointment of a missed word.  

Lucy continued to spell her given words correctly, frequently shooting me nervous smiles along the way.  But as the minutes ticked by, I watched her change in a way I wish I could adequately describe.  The ice of her initial anxiety melted a little, and she started to have fun. Not show-offy, I'm-so-smart fun.  Just sincere, slightly nervous and excited fun.  And she simply charmed the daylights out of that Spelling Bee.  

She applauded every contestant's spelling attempts.  And when her turn came, she'd smile a "deep-breath, here-we-go-again!" smile at me, or at her teacher and classmates.  Sometimes she'd deliberately march or shuffle to her spot in a goofy way that brought chuckles from many of he 1-3 graders in the room. ("Well, everyone looked pretty bored!"  she told me when I commented about it that night).  But most of the delight came her uncontrived enthusiasm.  She spelled each new word more quickly and fluidly than the previous.  She looked the moderator and judges in the eyes and smiled at them in anticipation of each word.  I almost laughed out loud when she subconsciously twirled around while spelling the word "dictate."

It was truly delightful to watch her.  A friend wrote to me today and said, "That Lucy of yours is one cute and special girl... She made the Spelling Bee look fun. =)"  

And she really did.  When I went back to the lunch-time silence of my own classroom following the competition, I couldn't help tears from squeezing out my eyes.  "Did you see our girl?!"  I mentally questioned Wes. I felt a surge of warmth, and a million different memories filled my mind, starting with that morning's images and floating much further back...all those evenings watching Lucy and Wes making foam-letter words together in the bathtub, all those afternoons in the Cannon Center lobby...Lucy: "Dad, you're an S,  Mom's a U,  I'm an N."  We'd all make our respective sounds at our respective times, and Wes and I would laugh and shake our heads over the top of our curly blond headed three-year-old who had no idea there were a million things in the word more fun than spelling words.  

After school and homework on the day of the Bee, we celebrated Lucy's spelling together at Cafe Rio.  And then we went to the store to get a Milky Way for her classmate Isaac who had been their class Spelling Bee champ but had missed a word early on in the finals and had to sit by so bravely (with red eyes) as the others continued.  Lucy wrote him a sweet note about how glad she was that they could be partners in the Spelling Bee and that his spelling was "out of this world,'  She and I laughed and laughed when she misspelled "awesome" at the end of the note.  A great reminder that nobody's perfect and that we all win some and lose some!  =)

Isaac's mom wrote today that he'd come home and said that Lucy was the nicest person he knows.  (Candy bars go a long way in third grade!! =).   I mentioned that comment quietly to Lucy later that evening, a few motherly tears in my eyes.  She smiled back at me with a few tears in her own.  "Isn't having good friends as wonderful as winning the spelling bee??"  I asked.

"Even better!"  she said.

And she's right.