Of Mice and Men

The best laid plans . . .
Sort of regretting my mom-follies this morning.
All the west-coast fam has been begging for new videos of gym girl.  There were no meets scheduled until Jan, so I've been putting them off.  Last night we had an in-house optional meet.  First judged meet, with critiques by the judges.  I had the camera all ready - gym girl was 2nd on bar, I was ready to amaze the grandma!  

Camera:  "battery has no charge remaining, powering down" *phhhht* (that is a word - look it up).  And she was amazing.      9.0 on bars, 8.3 beam - with no falls, barely any wobbles.  The last comment has to be taken in context. I was at almost every practice this week, all of the girls acted like the beam was greased, all week long. I don't remember seeing more than one or two routines where anyone actually stayed on the beam.  Yesterday, everyone, the entire squad, pulled off beautiful beam routines - no falls.   

So much fun to see all of the girls, and to watch the higher level optionals - the sneak preview of where our girls are going. The girls are all growing up, they work hard, play well together, it is a truly amazing thing.  I especially love that there seems to be no age gap when it comes to gym friends, the 9-year olds hang with the 14 year olds. They even work as a team when closing out siblings, even when the sibling are closer in age to the group than the gymnast.  OK the parental pride is mis-placed there, but, excluding your annoying sibling from your group of friends is part of having little/big brothers and sisters, it is just very cool that the girls have a team solidarity that they choose to keep close.

And - I really enjoy all of the parents.  After the meet was the annual team party we all ate, mingled, etc.  When the girls went off to break into work out groups for "secret Santa," we all got to hang and dish a little.  Nothing like a sport sponsored by a large city rec department to bring a vastly diverse group of people together.  The only thing we have in common is intense pride of our children and willingness to do whatever it takes to help our girls succeed.  We even define success differently, and for most of us, the definition has very little to do with gymnastics - gymnastics is a means to a goal, not the end game.  Over the years we have come to appreciate each others quirks, oddities, annoying behaviors, and genuinely share our common ground.  We love and support each other's girls, we help each other out however we can, and take pride in all of the team's accomplishments, on and off the floor.

A Truly great start to winter break!