My son competed in the state spelling bee yesterday at a university. This was his very first time to compete in front of other kids and judges and I was a little worried about his lack of experience, but he felt confident and seemed to look forward to it. He had only had to do a written test to qualify for the state bee and he was a regional winner based on his written test.

There were other boys at the competition that looked a little like my son. Most of them looked like smart kids that probably spent a lot of time reading or on the computer instead of doing sports. I don't think any of these kids had Asperger's and the kids I listened to also used a high level vocabulary, but they didn't seem as talkative as my son.

I thought his musical theater experience might help him, but he said it didn't. He said this was totally different.

He has never forgotten lines in his musical theater class, even when he started at age 4 and always seemed comfortable on stage, but then he had plenty of rehearsals. This time he was on a stage that he had never been on before, at a big university, with 40 other regional winners. He wasn't playing a part in a play, it was just him stepping up to the microphone, in front of a lot of people including a group of judges. All eyes were on him as he spelled his words and there was dead silence in the auditorium.

He made it through the first round and about 10 other kids didn't. I could tell he was getting very nervous when he stepped up to the microphone during the next round for his second word. He said the first couple of letters correctly and then stopped and when he spelled the rest of the word he repeated one of the letters he said before, making it wrong. He told me afterwards that he didn't know what happened. It was a word that he knew. He couldn't believe that he did it. He was a little embarrassed, but he didn't cry as a few of the kids did. He seemed okay at the luncheon for all the spellers afterwards. One of the speakers talked about how he missed an easy word the first time he did a spelling bee because he concentrated on all the hard words and thought he knew all the words in the book so he didn't go back and review the easy words before the spelling bee. He said it was a good lesson and he came back the next year and won. My son knew almost all of the words that were given to the remaining contestants to spell and whispered them to my husband and me before the contestant spelled them.

So last night was when he really started thinking about the spelling bee. Now he says he wishes he could have that part of his memory erased--the part where he missed that "easy" word. He says he wasted part of his childhood learning all of those thousands of words when he could have been doing something else.

Then he started talking like he thought he should go back and try it again next year, now that he has the experience, and knows what it will take to prepare for a spelling bee.

I told him it was up to him, but I thought he would be better off trying some other kind of competition for a change. I wish we had some kind of quiz bowl competition for homeschoolers in our area, but we don't. He loves trivia questions over different subjects. I think this would be much more fun to try to prepare for.