The first Friday after Christmas break, Raine competed in the school spelling bee finals. Fourteen kids qualified for the finals and Raine drew position #4 in the lineup.

She was SSSOOOOO incredibly nervous going into it. She didn’t want to be eliminated first and told me that she wanted to finish at least 7th.

At the beginning of the bee, they did a practice round where each student was given a really easy word to spell so they could get used to going up to the microphone and repeating the word. Raine’s word was “fell” and she proceeded to spell it “h… f-e-l-l.” Since you cannot take-back a letter after it has come out of your mouth, they rang the bell, indicating that she had misspelled the word. Fortunately, this was a practice round so she was not out, but boy did it rattle her little cage! She was visibly mortified.

Somehow she managed to work through her nerves and spell the next three words correctly. In the fourth round she misspelled bulletin (swapped the e and i) and was eliminated with three other students. There were only six students left once Raine’s group sat down so that means that she took 7th place, just like she wanted!

Raine wasn’t particularly happy with how she did (after all, as she said “I almost spelled a bad word in front of the whole school”), but I told her that she will do much better next year, now that she has one under her belt. As someone who can’t spell AT ALL, I was wholly impressed that she even made it into the finals (although, I too held my breath as I thought she was about to spell a bad word in front of the whole school)! In the end, I was so proud of Raine that I picked up a special cake and stuffed animal for her on my way home from work — she really loved that!