Career Day

Christopher signed up to speak at Zack's career day for 4th grade this year. We didn't realize it was during an insane time with Ben's graduation, Grandparents coming in, end of school year, Nick's birthday, Graduation parties, insane week at work for Christopher - etc.....but we made it work!

In true Erickson fashion there were a few little hiccups.  Christopher had planned his whole talk with fun science tricks with liquid nitrogen. He made sure he could buy it from a company - all was good. The morning of career day Ben and Christopher drove down to pick up the liquid nitrogen and found out they actually wouldn't sell it to him. It was a mess. So they hurried home and spent the little time they had trying to come up with other fun science experiments to get 4th graders excited about science. This is what your kitchen looks like after they play mad scientist for 40 minutes (and empty random shaped jars so there are multiple bowls filled with random items - cloves, hand soap, poppy seeds, salad dressing - etc).  After a bit of trial and error they had a "routine" down!

Once Nick heard we were going to school he grabbed the essentials - backpack full of who knows what treasures and his rain boots (yes it was 90+ degrees, but you can never be too prepared) and off we went with Grandma and Papa to show off to Zack's class too!

Talk around the hallway (or so we heard from another teacher) was this was the talk not to miss!  We visited for the last rotation and there were a handful of other teachers who came to watch too. As Papa observed it is easier getting into a prison then the school!  With locked doors, checking all ID's, getting a chaperone for us - we felt very sketchy.  Thankfully we made it safely to Zack's class where Miss. W made us all feel right at home - as she always does!  Oh, and look who is warming up enough to let Papa hold him!??!?!  PRGRESS!!! 

And can I just say living in VA, you get a very different group of "career day" volunteers. While we were waiting in the office to be "cleared", we talked with a few different people also waiting to be cleared or checked out.  A few examples of speakers were a CIA trauma nurse, doctor, sharp shooter, marine, CIA profiler from Quantico, Navy seaman, FBI crime scene photographer, Presidential Secret Service, fighter pilot, - and these are just the ones I talked with!