A return to the Podium and a Special Surprise that worked!

 The second of 5 competitive gymnastics meets for Kay occurred this past Friday and she was very nervous and in true Kay form completely focused on the event. She was also pleased she was able to skip school for the day however in her school journal she did make a notation for the
following Monday " Remember to ask Ms. Chung what I missed on Friday"

In her previous meet she ran into some difficulties with the bar and the beams and she spent the last couple of weeks working to overcome them. Just to explain to anyone who is seeing this for the first time and I am sorry for the avid followers if this is repetitive.... There are 4 events in each of the meets, the uneven bars, the balance beam, the vault and the floor routine. This was the first meet that Kay was the only member of her gymnastics academy that was in attendance for the age 10 level 3 competition. It was apparent after the first hour or so she was missing her teammates as the coach had only one athlete to keep focused on the competition and Kay sat down for maybe 10 minutes the whole morning. Back hand spring, back walk over, practice your beam routine, back hand spring, back walk over, practice you floor routine, back hand spring...you get the picture.














First up for Kay was the bars, in the previous meet she was penalized because she had to let go in order to compete the routine which was unfair (she was too short to do what they wanted her to do but they wouldnt lower the bar) but she learned from that event and this time around hit a 9.325 which was awesome. She followed that with a beam routine where she nailed her back walk over, was tad shaky and received a 9.3. Floor was next in which she was awesome. I think a picture say's a 1000 words. The vault was last where she hit a 9.25, her best vault ever. There is an app that is available that tracks the athletes and scores the standings and at the time of publishing this we have not figured out how to use it so we were unsure where she was in the standings with around 100 or competitors.

The podium is set up with the top 9 places receiving and award or medal and the categories are set so that each of the athletes is recognized for the events and then an overall championed is chosen. The girls spend several hours working on their routines and many more practicing for when the announcer says " Athletes can you please present", it looks like this.






Kay came in 5th place on the vault which is the first time she has won an medal in vault and the proceeded to walk away with first on bars, beam and floor and then taking home the overall champion award as well. She was all smiles and happy and her coach was very proud of her, not mention Mom and Dad were super proud as well. Kay wanted to go to a special lunch. And.. on the way to lunch all the working out, practicing back walk overs, floor and beam routine got to her so a little nap was required.
Way to go Kay we are all proud of your commitment and love of gymnastics!!!

The kids have this built in response mechanism that whenever we tell them ' hey we have a surprise for you' they hound us for details on what it is therefore ruining the surprise before it even starts, well not this time. The main reason was we didn't tell them there was a surprise family function until we were in the car on the way to the surprise. Back in December we saw a Groupon for Harlem Globetrotters tickets and thought that would be a blast, but the event was on April 13th so we just decided to wait.
The kids were all surprised and had a blast. Tracy has wanted to see the Globetrotters since she was a kid and it was well worth it. They are funny, crazy, crowd invoking and downright silly, good clean family fun. In a surprise turn of events they even won the game!!! It was a blast and we are all happy we went, next up Cancun...more to come...