Rachel’s first USAG competition in over 18 months was this past weekend.  You may be asking yourself, “how does Ruth know how many months that it has been since Rachel’s last competition?”.  It’s easy.  Rachel’s last competition was on Feb 22, 2013, which also happens to be Sarah Amelia’s birthday!  Yep – I didn’t even bother asking the nurses or doctor to let me attend.  It also happened to be the biggest meet of the year, and I missed it.  There were a few non-USAG meets following Sarah’s birth, but they weren’t on the same scale.

Over the course of the past year, I have tried to dial back my involvement with gymnastics.  (Of course there is the mega transportation time commitment, see the Time blog!)  By “dial back” I mean that I don’t watch every second of practice, and I try to reduce the overall conversation about the sport.  That is really tough for me, but I have to remind myself of several things.  (1) Rachel is an 8-year old child.  I should be talking with her about school, friends, faith, and what’s going on in the world instead of “if you just tried a little harder you could have a beautiful routine”. (2) Rachel has ADHD.  It is a MIRACLE that she manages as well as she does in school and everything else. Rachel needs to be secure knowing that our love is unconditional and not contingent upon performance. (3) I want to teach Rachel about hard work, determination, and persistence, but it is also up to me and Bryan to be her advocate.  Because of the ADHD thing, I have spent most of Rachel’s childhood apologizing to people.  I have finally realized that I have to stop that.  I should be like the other moms of the world – I should be her cheerleader not her constant judge.

Back to the competition, about two weeks ago Rachel had decided that she couldn’t do the floor routine, because she had “lost her backhand spring”. UGH – REALLY!  I had to remind myself of the 3 things listed in the last paragraph and take a deep breath.  OK, so me being me, I researched everything that I could about backhand springs and competition readiness.  According to Google, this was a mental thing.  I am not a psychologist, but I talked with Rachel about this.  I started off with telling her how talented a gymnast that she is and that she should not let fear stop her.  She told me that she didn’t want to “break her head”!  I told her that I didn’t want that either, but if she stayed in the sport she would be doing even bigger tricks.

She turned things around.  About a week away from the meet, she told me the coaches were going to let her do all events!  Awesome.  I was secretly hoping that I hadn’t pushed her too much, but the coaches told me and Bryan she was fine.

Ok – so on the day of the meet, I got a sitter for Sarah Amelia because the meet was late in the day, and I couldn’t handle chasing her around at the end of the day while trying to watch Rachel.  I slicked Rachel’s hair back into the neatest pony tail possible and off we went.  I was so nervous that I could barely count the money for entry into the meet.  Rachel was cool but  oddly quiet.  My friend Tina and her daughter (also a gymnast) came to support Rachel.  That was so nice!  Tina is one of those folks that  makes you laugh and is great to be around 🙂

First event – vault.  Now I had never seen her do a good vault in practice, but then again, I hadn’t been watching much of practice.  The first vault wasn’t bad but the second one was kind of a wipe-out. Score 8.8 (out of 10) – not bad!  However, I think it was last place in her group.  Still, it was much better than I expected!

Second event – bars.  Typically, Rachel does well on bars, but recently she had been having trouble with one of the skills. She managed to stay on the bar and did fine.  But, every little bent arm or leg means points off – score 8.5.  Again, not bad for her first bar routine in a competition in almost 18 months!

Third event – beam.  I love to watch her do beam and traditionally her best scores are on beam.  Now though, there are a lot of details in the beam work and body form is imperative. Score 8.325.

Fourth event – floor.  The trickiest one.  The one with the dreaded round-off back handspring!  Later, she told me that she was really nervous on this one because “everyone was watching”!  She did fine.  score 8.2.

Before the meet, I emphasized to Rachel that getting a medal is not important.  Effort was the most important thing and I told her that I loved her and was proud of her no matter what the outcome.  Go me….  Anyway, the awards came and she got an “all-around medal” – for last place.  She was so proud of that media,  but I didn’t think that she understood that 16th was  last place.  She said “I am going to tell everybody that I got a medal”.  This made me nervous, because I didn’t want her to brag (I blame myself for her tendency to brag).  I told her that it was for last place.  Major mom fail!  HUGE fail!  “you mean that this is basically nothing!  I was so happy until you told me that it was last place!”  Holy crap!  I hugged her and tried to explain myself and that I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, etc.  No dice.  Ugh.  A  Sonic Reese’s Peanut Blast smoothed over the edges.

So, I told Rachel that she should share her story and medal with her Sunday school friends and that cheered her up.  I wrote her overall score and the date on the back. I told her that she could take it to school and show her teacher, and she decided to show it off at “fit club”.  I explained to her that her scores were good enough to qualify for the District Championship  and that was really very spectacular!  Again this morning, I told her how proud I was and that she should be proud of herself too!  I told her that she was very brave and improved so much and that we couldn’t be more proud of her!

So, I think that all is well.  I am so proud of my little gymnast!