Pony Express

Freestone has a couple of teachers that he just loves, and Mr. Brumbaugh is one of them.  So Free wanted to do a great job on his history fair project.  The problem is that he hates to write, type, or generally form written sentences of any kind.  He can talk up a storm, but there's a block with his writing and typing.  Maybe it's because he's awkwardly left handed and his writing is terrible.  At any rate, he procrastinated this project, fretting every step of the way that it wasn't somehow magically getting done.

On the last night, he got it completed, with typing help from Mom.  We're getting our money's worth out of this map we made a couple of years ago.  Ruby used it for a book report, and now it is the proud vessel of knowledge for the Pony Express history fair project.  You gotta work smart, and this map is a good visual backdrop for these kinds of things.

I'm proud of Freestone for wanting to do a good job, and persevering on something that's hard.  I went with his to the history fair after school the other day, and his project looked sharp in there among all the other projects.  I used to think that some of the better-looking projects were parent-driven, and maybe they are, but the way my kids can navigate their way around a computer, and come up with professional-looking graphics, is way beyond my capabilities.  It's better for my kids if I just let them work their magic.

If you're my age, you remember when computers weren't a thing.  My parents dropped me off at a computer class at the high school when I was Freestone's age, so I could catch the wave of the future.  Our job was to build a virtual lemonade stand and sell lemonade.  First of all, I recognized it as a thinly veiled ploy to get me to do math.  Secondly, the only thing that ever came up on my black screen were the green, blinking words, "Syntax error!  Syntax error!"  I made the decision then to wait until computers got smarter before using them.  Computers are pretty smart now.  Its' galling to think of the hours and hours I spent in junior high and high school, painstakingly blowing on Wite-Out, manually adjusting margins, slipping a new piece of paper in the typewriter after spoiling the last one with a mistake.  Kids have it so easy now, compared to the dark ages of the 1980's...let alone the days of the Pony Express!  Ten days to get a letter from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to San Francisco, as opposed to a split second.  No syntax errors these days, and no horses, either!