More gymnastics pictures

Wednesday, September 26

DH was able to come with me to Blondie's gymnastics class and take a few pictures with his camera:

Gymnastics

In the spring when we were deciding who to sign up for soccer for this year, I promised Blondie that if she would rather do gymnastics than soccer, I would find a place for her to take it again in the fall.  Well, when fall was approaching I was still unsure where to take her.  One of my visiting teachers said that her older took gymnastics for a time from our city rec center where you just sign up by the month and they offer classes on the different apparatus as well.  I looked into it and the prices were pretty reasonable and it was offered on a day when I would be able to make it work with our schedule.  When I offered Blondie the chance to take the gymnastics class on the apparatus, she was super excited, especially after just having watched the Summer Olympics.  So I signed Blondie up for the month of September and she has loved it!  It is just an hour class one day a week but she is having fun with it.  I then signed her up for October and I might have her move up a level for the month of November, I will talk to the teacher about it the next time we go.  They rotate the groups between the floor, uneven bars, high bar, rings, vault and balance beam.  They have 4 rotations each week so they put out different apparatus each week.  Blondie's favorite event to work on is the vault.

Here are a few not-so-great pictures of her.  (They were taken on October 3.)  It is hard taking pictures and trying not to distract the class - plus the lighting is pretty poor in the room...

Tumbling year in review

Blondie had her last Tumbling class the last Friday in March. We found out at her second to last class that the teacher had to end the classes at the end of the month because of a class that he had to take. We are quite sad. Blondie has loved the class and the teacher and she has learned a lot more in one year than she did her first year taking it and more than M&M learned from all of the Tumbling classes we tried with her. Blondie's teacher was really good with the kids and he actually knew how to teach the different skills and could demonstrate for the kids. We have decided to take some time off from tumbling and then in the fall see if we are able to fit a tumbling class into our schedule (and hopefully with the same teacher). The last thing that Blondie was working on was a roundoff into a back handspring (with her teacher spotting her). I will try and get some video of her up when I get a moment. The one nice thing about the class ending though is that I have less running around to do on Fridays (and it's especially nice with soccer having started up again).

Busy days are here again!

Well, now that school is fully in the swing of things, so are all of the extra-curricular activities. So here is a look at the activities going on throughout the week:

• Monday - I am helping out with Luke's class twice a month from 2-3. This is the one day where we don't have anything scheduled after school...


• Tuesday - M&M has band after school until 4:30, Luke has cub scouts from 4-5, and my cub scout group meets from 7-8.


• Wednesday - Kitty just started a ballet/tap class which meets from 10:15-11:15. Luke has soccer practice from 5-6 (and I am the coach).


• Thursday - I am helping out Blondie's class twice a month in the morning. M&M has band followed immediately by soccer practice until 5:45.


• Friday - Every other Friday M&M has activity days from 2:15-3:15, Blondie just started a tumbling class from 4:30-5:30 and I finally got M&M and Luke signed up for piano lessons which will be at 4:00 and 4:30.


• Saturday - Soccer games in the morning. Thankfully the latest games this season are at 12:30 so the games don't have to take up the whole day. The downside is that there are a couple of games scheduled at the same time so I go to Luke's game to coach while DH gets to take the rest of the family to M&M's game so I don't have the distraction of having them around.

End of Tumbling

M&M had her last tumbling class last week and the end of the year performance the Saturday before that. Unfortunately the group she was with this year really went downhill and I don't think she learned much of anything this year. She is at the age and skill level that she really could have learned a lot, but it just didn't happen with this group and teachers. So, she will either not take tumbling next year or we will need to find a different group if she wants to continue. Unfortunately with 4 other kids and 2 of them in soccer, we really don't have a lot of free time for more activities. So we will see what happens in another month or so. The one plus to M&M's class was that she had two friends from our neighborhood in the group and so we were able to carpool and they had a lot of fun together.M&M is the second girl from the front.

Tumbling

I have been deliberating the last couple of months as to whether or not to enroll M&M in tumbling this year. I had pretty much decided to take a year off from it when I got a card in the mail from the place she attended last year and then a friend in the ward called to see if M&M was going to do it again. The class that they want to put M&M in is on Tuesday evenings from 7:30-9 p.m. That just seems SO late to me since we try to have the kids in bed by 9:00. So I told her that no we weren't interested but to let me know if her daughter (M&M's friend) was going to do it or not.

Well, my friend called the lady in charge of the classes and found out that M&M is already signed up for the class so she signed her daughter up and now the class is full. She told me this on Sunday and I thought some more about it and decided that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have M&M in the class because we shouldn't have any conflicts with soccer practices this time around and it's not in the middle of dinner time like last year. Plus we would be able to car pool because this friend just lives a block away. So I said that would discuss it with my husband and M&M and we would let her know before class time on Tuesday. DH isn't too crazy about the late time because that's usually when we read scriptures but we think we can figure out a workaround for one night a week so we left it up to M&M to decide if she wants to do it. After much coaxing and prodding M&M finally said that yes she would like to continue with tumbling so I think we'll try it out tonight. I know that she will enjoy being in the same class as her friend - we tried to get them in the same class last year but because of different family schedules we signed up for different ones.

It's really hard to get M&M to tell us what she wants because she is so concerned about pleasing us. She knows we're concerned about how late the class is and about the time commitment and so she worries about that and doesn't want to tell us what she really would like to do. It's the same way with birthdays and Christmas. She is so concerned with how much things cost or whether or not DH and I would approve that we can never figure out what she really wants.

M&M's tumbling performance

M&M did a good job on her performance. She has a lot of talent with tumbling - most of it just comes naturally to her. The first little section is their "warm-up" where each of the students did some tumbling across the stage. The second section is the routine that her class did.

Unexpected repairs

On Friday we all piled into the van to go to the White Family Christmas Party. DH was driving and on the way there, the car was making a horrible grinding noise every time he hit the brakes. It was a painful drive there and back home again, the whole time wondering what was causing the noise and why we have never heard it before. I drive the van almost everyday and I'm sure I would have noticed that noise before (especially since it seemed to be coming more from the driver's side). We were pretty sure it had something to do with the brakes, but we were hoping that maybe there was something frozen in place since our high temperatures for the past week have been below freezing. After we got home, DH took off the front driver's side tire and sure enough, the brakes pads were completely gone and were grinding into the rotor - not a good thing. DH did some looking online and our hope was that he could figure out how to take the rotor off and find a place that could resurface it for us.

Unfortunately, this was horrible timing because we had a full day of activities planned for Saturday. M&M had her tumbling performance across the valley at 8:30 in the morning and then we were going to spend the day at my parents house decorating cookies and helping them put up their Christmas tree and then we were all going to attend Blondie's ballet performance in the evening.

So we decided to just pile everyone in our other car to make it to M&M's performance and then we drove to my parents afterwards and left the kids there while DH & I went back home to look into repairs for the van. Luckily we ran into someone at the tumbling performance from our ward that DH thought might know something about cars and so he asked him where we could go to get a rotor resurfaced. He said that Checkers does it at their store and it only costs about $10 dollars! So on our way home we stopped at Checkers, bought a repair manual for our van, bought some new brake pads and asked about getting a rotor resurfaced. They said it takes about an hour to do and said it would be about $11.

So DH & I went home and figured out how to take the brakes & rotor off and then took it to Checkers. They said it would take about 45 minutes to an hour and would be $9. So we left it with them and then went out to lunch (I must say it was nice not having the kids with us). Then we stopped at Sears and bought some halogen work lamps to give some more light in the garage and then went home to see if the store had called yet. Well, they had but unfortunately it wasn't good news. Apparently after we left the store the guy went back to start the resurfacing and realized that they were missing some of the pieces to their machine and so they couldn't do it for us. So we went back to the store, picked up the rotor and took it to another Checkers store that they had called to make sure they could do it (unfortunately we lost about an hour and a half of work time because of this delay).

After we finally got the rotor back it was pretty straight forward putting everything back together and then changing the brake pads on the other side (fortunately the rotor looked alright on the other side). Then we quickly cleaned up and drove to my parents house so I could pick up Blondie and take her to her ballet recital. Unfortunately we were late getting her there and the room was already packed so I wasn't able to get very good seats.

DH came with the rest of the family, my parents, sister M, brother D & his wife K after eating some dinner and were lucky that they made it there in time to see Blondie perform. Overall the repair on the van went pretty smoothly and it was nice not having the kids around so that I was able to be out there helping DH. It was a bitter cold day and it was nice having a garage to keep us out of the wind. I borrowed an electric heater from my parents that helped take some of the bitterness out of the air, but my hands are still suffering from the cold and dry temps. They were very red and raw on Saturday evening. Today they are finally looking a little better...

Thanks Mom & Dad and M for looking after the kids for us (& helping them decorate cookies)!