District Meet

Emma had her district meet this afternoon.


It was her highest all around as a level 7 so far. This is the team's 1st place trophy she is holding here.

Photo 106 of 365, taken April 21st:

After the meet we went to The Machine Shed to celebrate my mom's birthday. It was yummy!

Rebekah was sad in this photo because she wanted a sock monkey from the restaurant gift shop. Grandpa must have felt bad for her because he sent Alyssa in to get it for her :-)

Emma's Level 7 State Meet

Sunday was Emma's level 7 State Meet. She did a great job, scoring her second highest all around of the season.


I'm not sure what I am saying to Emma here, but it looks serious. Because of the timing of the sessions, I needed to be the coach on the floor for Emma's group. I think it made me more nervous than her, she seemed completely un-phased by my presence. She just did what she always does while my mind raced like crazy trying to keep up :-)

Photo 80 of 365, taken March 24th:

Great meet, Little Em! We are very proud of you!!

Wow, Gymnastics!

The gymnastics meet in Iowa was super intense, some of the highest scores I have seen at a USAG meet ever. They started the meet in a very different way than I have ever seen as well. After marching in and announcing the participating teams, they had the teams gather at the middle of the floor.

Photo 65 of 365, taken March 2nd. The announcer had some words of advice for all the gymnasts, then they began cheering as they huddled together. Even though they give team awards at meets, gymnastics tends to be a very individual sport. It was kind of neat to see them encourage unity among the competitors.

Overall, it was a good meet for Emma. She had her highest vault, beam and all around scores of the season, setting the level 7 club record on beam and all around for her gym. There were girls in her age group scoring 9.6-9.7 on every event, and she wasn't quite scoring that, but she kept a positive attitude about it, and it is good for her to see that such a high level of competition is out there.

Photo 66 of 365, taken March 2nd. Her team ended up in 3rd place.

Photo 67 of 365, taken March 2nd. A highlight of the day was meeting 2012 Olympic Team alternate, Anna Li. Anna was there coaching for her family's gym. She is probably one of the best female uneven bar workers in the world.

Fox 6 Wake Up

Photo 46 of 365, taken February 20th:

This morning, Fox 6 Wake Up News came to our gym. They feature a segment called Learn With Laura, in which one of their reporters visits area attractions and learns what they specialize in there. She came to try out her gymnastics skills and I was pretty impressed! Laura did great and all our gymnasts had a lot of fun with a camera crew in the gym. Emma looks like she took a bath in the chalk for this photo.

There are a couple of video clips below where Emma is in the background as Laura learns gymnastics.

Here she is on beam.

And vaulting here.

Cruise Classic

I'm jumping a bit out of order here, but these are some gymnastics pictures from our home meet last weekend.

Alyssa in action. She is not officially competing again, she just wanted to jump in since it was our home meet. She loves the sport but because of other activities that she loves even more, she only gets the chance to work out about once once a week {sometimes not even that often} when I coach. It was so much fun for her to pick out music for floor, she chose a song from Les Miserables, and we choreographed a routine in our living room. She was so proud of it!!

Some of Emma's pics from the meet.

I loved this photo of Emma running down the vault runway. When she first started gymnastics she used to bolt down the runway with a huge, silly grin on her face ~ something she still does quite frequently, but she's also gotten more serious in her vault technique as well. One of the boys on team was watching Emma vault recently and he told Alyssa, wow, your sister is really intense! Vault is probably not her best event, but she sure does attack it!

Photo 41 of 365, taken February 10th:

Oddly enough the girls, although competing in different levels, had the same exact all around score on the day: 34.55. Alyssa was 1st in her age division and level and Emma was 5th. It was a fun meet!

Finishing Up January

To finish up the month of January...

Photo 28 of 365, taken January 16th:

I had to search my photos from the month and see which ones I could squeeze in here at the end of the month to finish with a total of at least 31 :-). This picture was taken one Wednesday night at church in the room where I teach, right before the girls ran off to their own classrooms.

Silly bucket head. How her time in my kindergarten Daisies room has already come and gone is completely beyond me.

Photo 29 of 365, taken January 19th:

Rebekah loves to climb stuff. I remember doing similar things when I was young, and how nervous it used to make my Aunt Laura {I think my parents were pretty used to it, and I don't remember them ever telling me to stop or get down}. I remember always wondering what my aunt was so worried about when I would scale walls and such. Now with my own three little monkeys even though I know it's unlikely that they will actually fall, I can better understand my aunt's concerns!

Photo 30 of 365, taken January 27th:

A club in our area hosts an invitational each winter in support of breast cancer awareness and all the proceeds from the meet are donated to causes that help women currently going through treatment and education for young women/girls about breast cancer prevention. Such an awesome idea ~ I hope our gym continues to be invited every single year!

All the gymnasts who participate are given a pink ribbon leo. I think the new leo was a huge incentive for Emma to bounce back from her pneumonia as quickly as possible. I kept telling her that she would get her leo regardless of whether she was well enough to compete or not, but she was determined to get well and not miss her chance to compete in pink!

She also wanted a photo of her hair from the day...it had already been through a lot of flips and some really icy, snowy weather so this was the best I could get. She loved the glitter.

Photo 31 of 365, taken January 27th:

The girls were happy that Emma's friend Halle and my parents could come see the meet! It was cold and icy, and the roads were terrible, but it was still a good day.

Alyssa told me this morning, "Wow, today is the last day of the first month of 2013. This year is going by quick already!" I have always thought that kids seem to process time differently than adults do ~ the minutes and hours are somehow longer for them, and what seems like a short period of time to me seems like asking the girls to wait forever. So it occurred to me that if time was moving quickly for Alyssa, then the new year must really be moving along at an incredible pace.

A Day for Gymnastics

As I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday was Emma's first level 7 meet. The day turned out to pretty much revolve around gymnastics fun. You can click the collage for a few action shots of Emma from the day. Emma's group competed in the morning, then we went out to lunch with my parents...

After lunch, Emma's friend and teammate, Anastasia came over to our house so the girls could make motivational t-shirts. This is something they have been asking me to do for weeks at practice.

For dinner, the girls wanted gymnast and star shaped pasta, which we can thank our pasta fundraiser for the super fun shapes! We later returned to the meet for the evening session to watch their friend, Hallie compete.

Emma and her two friends from gymnastics, Anastasia and Khalizstall, refer to themselves as Hopis {pronounced Hope- E plural}. I'm not sure if this is an actual gymnastics thing, or something they just made up. They send each other encouraging notes and sign all of them L9H, which stands for Level 9 Hopi. Another thing I am not sure about is their pre-occupation with Level 9, as there are 10 levels and the gymnasts who appear on tv are the highest level a gymnast can reach, called Elite. But for now, the girls have their focus set on achieving level 9. The above is a picture of what I mistakenly called their "code" but then they pointed out to me near the bottom of the page that they had used a stronger word than code: it's their law.

Any gymnast who wants to get better should stand next to these girls. Their "laws" as listed above are not only pretty good goals for gymnastics, but for life as well.

Emma's First Level 7 Meet

Photo 10 of 365, taken January 12th.

Emma had her first level 7 gymnastics meet yesterday. She's still got a lot that she wants to "fix" and work on, but she did everything I asked of her, didn't fall on anything and qualified for State. Can't ask much more than that for a first meet!

Wisconsin Dells ~ The Meet

June 23rd was a different kind of meet for Emma.

It was the first meet that she competed in without any of her teammates alongside her. It was also the first meet that she wore red and black, instead of purple and black. The leo had "Wisconsin" written on the back, and she was proud to represent her club and state in her first ever National Meet.

She danced...

tumbled...

swung...

leaped...

and did her prettiest poses through all her routines.

And throughout, we watched every moment and were all so proud of her!

When the meet was over, we all wanted to get a picture with the AAU Level 6 National All Around Champion. Good thing she happened to be in our family :-)

One of the vault judges was Dianne Durham, 1983 US National Champion and she was briefly my coach when I was growing up.

Emma also got to meet 2000 Olympian, Morgan White. Who in my opinion is one of the hardest working gymnasts there has ever been, but unfortunately you may not know her name as well as others because she never actually competed in Sydney after she broke her ankle shortly after arriving to the Olympic Games. Morgan was so sweet to Emma, signing her leo and telling her how strong she felt when she gave her hug.

Good Job, Little Emma! You amaze us!!

And thank you so much to her cheering squad! In addition to Dave's parents and my parents, my Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ray also took the trip to see Emma compete, and Emma had a handful of teammates who weren't even competing in her session stay to encourage her on ~ it was so cool for her to have a crowd of support! Thank You!!

Happy 4th of July and a Start of Summer Recap

Happy 4th of July!! Ours was very warm {fun too}, as was the case for most of the nation, but we are so thankful to celebrate the birthday and freedom of a great country, and one that we are truly blessed to live in!! Many of these pictures below were taken back in early June at one of the events that we always kick off Summer with ~ Reclaiming Our Heritage, Multi-Era Military Re-enactment. Our girls love going to this event so much and it's a wonderful way to learn about American History. It always makes me feel very patriotic to learn about the lives of American soldiers throughout the history of our country. There are so many who have made such a great sacrifice.

Due to funding issues, last year was supposed to be their Grand Finale event, but there were so many people disappointed that it was brought back for at least one more year.

They had an eat your weight in popcorn contest. Just kidding, but that's a lot of kettle corn and the five of us ate.it.all.

A serious conversation being had over kettle corn and root beer. I often wonder what they're talking about.

They had a booth where current military servicemen were applying fake wounds to any child who wanted one. To which Alyssa promptly said "No, thank you." But it was like artwork! This man was so careful with every detail of Emma's injury, and seemed to take a lot of pride in his work.

Emma loved her wound! She was very proud and kept staring at it like it was a badge of honor or something. In some ways, she is a tiny bit like the little boy her poor Daddy never had.

A close up of the wound we still have resting on a loose leaf sheet of paper because Emma can't bear to part with the fake shard of glass.

Rebekah was slightly less impressed with her bruise :)

We got to do lots of cool things like color patriotic pictures that were sent to soldiers currently deployed, sing patriotic songs, look at the first generation "viewmaster", see newspapers that date back to the American Revolution, and Emma tried to convince me she would wear the raccoon hat to school all Winter if we would buy it for her.

Alyssa not looking very comfortable on the bed of the injured.

And apparently we need to have another child so that Abraham Lincoln can have a face in this photo.

The same weekend back in June, and again for the 4th of July, the girls had parades and gymnastics exhibitions.


Aren't these patriotic leos the cutest?

And because my mom has to be one of the coolest Grandmas ever:
She and Alyssa competed as a relay team in a duathlon. Alyssa ran two miles, my mom biked 10 miles, then Alyssa ran two more miles. Pretty awesome, huh?

Alyssa finishing strong. She's all pumped to compete again next year!