on saturday, eleanor, traci and i were recruited to be in a spelling bee…tonight.

not much time to prepare, but we figured since it’s a fundraiser for the local schools, and we are nerds, why the heck not?

this particular spelling bee is a 3-person team sport and involves costumes:

since we had such short notice, we came up with what any knitter would - covering ourselves in a ridiculous amount of knitted goods. we had plenty lying around. (and, let’s be honest, i’m always looking for an excuse to wear my knitted wig.)

39 teams were whittled down to just one over the course of the super exciting night. many “bee” puns were made.

the tension grew as we got ready for our round:

then it was showtime.

this is one of the words we spelled correctly*:

but after missing “schnauzer,” (we debated Z vs. S for our full 15 seconds of conferring time) we only had one chance left.

and here is the word that took us out:

efflorescence. we had good, solid, reasoning to stick a U in there, but alas it was not to be. the crowd’s sad “awwwww” made the loss a little easier to take, though.

the upside, however, is that once you are knocked out of the round, you are encouraged to continue writing things on your board. it’s good, snarky fun.

thanks, jaz, for getting us involved!

and, girls, get ready, because beginning tomorrow, this will be us. 10th Annual Spelling Bee, here we come!

*for the record, while we were sitting in the audience waiting for our round, we managed to spell correctly most of the words that the other teams were given.