Maybe it was the ponytails. Last year, Day-Hay�s team went to regionals of the Battle of the Books competition. A group of girls team ribbons for their ponytails as well as the more common matching team shirts beat them soundly and went on to take first place. This year, Day-Hay is on a different team and she has not yet gone to regionals but she will be. Her team did not win the right to go to regionals because of the luck of matching shirts because they don�t have the matching shirts�yet. According to her, they won because they put their hair in ponytails for every battle.

At first, I feared she was serious. She does tend to believe that anything good that happens to someone else is brains or hard work but what happens to her is bad luck. I needn�t have worried. She was willing to recognize that it had something to do with reading most of the books on the list. It also had something to do with having two other girls on her team that are very good readers�although there was an element of luck about that. Her original team, the one that abandoned the game at the eleventh hour, would not have been nearly as strong, even if they had put in the work.

She wanted to add the hair ribbons but she�s settling for the shirts. One of the girls on her team would not be caught dead in a hair ribbon�even for a good cause�so Day-Hay has to restrain herself. I�m just glad that I don�t have to try to deal with hair ribbons. The Martha Stewart in me will be helping the girls design shirts and painting them. I shudder to think what design we may come up with for a team that calls itself �The Great Brains� (although, to be fair, the name comes from one of the books they had to read and I think it was one of the ones I came up with when they were brainstorming in my kitchen.)

We�ll need shirts and a banner (which Day-Hay says she�ll make on the computer.) Then, on April 25th, we will truck way down to the south side of the city to a Catholic school called St. Gregory�s. And the battle will begin. Teams will be asked fifteen questions about any of sixty books on their list. They then will have 30 seconds to give the correct title (including �a� and �the�) and the author of the book that answers the question. In Day-Hay�s school competition, if a team could not answer, the other team could. The regional competition has a �no-steal� rule this year. There are two rounds.

Day-Hay is very happy she is going to regionals (or, as they are calling it this year, invitationals.) Her teammates, both of whom were on the school team that lost to Day-Hay in the finals by one point last year, are ecstatic.

Battle of the Books, here we come!

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