Updates and Robotics

I can't believe I have not written here for more than 2 months! Time flies and life does not pause for me. I can't even remember all what happened in the last two months. We finished the girls' swimming season in earlier February. Both Anna and Jenny did great job! Anna qualified for the "A" meet competition for both 25 yard free style and back stroke. In the final meet, she also lead her team to the meet champion for the 100 yards free style relay. She placed the 13rd place out of total 80 swimmers in the 25 free style. She finished the 25 yards in just 19 seconds!
Jenny did equally well for her first year competition considering she even did not know how to swim 12 months before. In her "B" meet conference, her relay team also won the championship. She was very excited about swimming and was a very competitive swimmer!
Toby recovered very well. I can't believe it was only 2 months ago he had the surgery. He only missed one week of school. He has been eating normal food on the 4th week. Sadly, he is so sick of smoothies. He has been busy with catching up on school work, job and Robotics. He is glad that he finally got his college applications out of his way. He is considering himself now a Wolverine - GoBlue, Toby!!
Both Toby and Joshua are on their school Robotic Team. For this year, they had to design and make a robot that carries a trailer and can throw balls on to another robot's trailer all in 6 weeks. Both boys are very active members of the team. Toby was glad that his initial design was put into work as the a part of the final product. Joshua became a lead programmer for the robot. Last weekend, they put their robot to work in their first competition at Kettering University. There were 40 some teams. Their team and robot placed 3rd place in their qualification runs. For each team, there are three driving members. Two of the members control the robot with remote controllers. The third member is a human thrower who throws the balls to the opposite alliance teams' trailers. Toby was elected as the human thrower. He did awesome job!! It was a good feeling as a parent to hear the audience chanting "Toby! Toby! Toby!".
It has happened many times before and it happened again last weekend. In such a major event like the Robotic Competition, we forgot to take our camera! Luckily some of their team members had uploaded some photos onto their face book page...so here I am, shameless stealing from them.
Two more competitions to go yet. So we have more chances to take more photos...
Here are the photos that I stole....