Ice Challenge '19: Where Chairs Not Dare to Tread

Hi gang.

By now, you folks are well-aware that our daughter, Abby, has been involved in gymnastics for the last year or so.  This only makes sense, seeing how she's always been a natural-born daredevil, doing handstands and cartwheels, crashing into stationary objects and incurring all sorts of bruises and scrapes for years. 

She's always enjoyed gymnastics (more or less because of Netflix's treasure trove of kid-friendly, American Girl movies based on the sport), but she's really gotten into gymnastics since she's been enrolled in the Midland Gymnastic Center, and over the last year we've gotten to watch her once a week tumbling, flipping, and doing all sorts of stuff on bars and matts and beams.

Today was her annual exhibition, which was perplexingly titled Ice Challenge 2019.  We invited several of the grandparents to come out to this, assuming that the Midland Gymnastic Center could accommodate multiple family members for each student participating.  The complex doesn't have much as far as spectator space goes, but we assumed they had somewhat of a game plan - it's not like they'd expect a hundred or so adults to stand around shoulder-to-shoulder, crammed together like they're at a punk concert or something, right?

Fool me once, Midland Gymnastic Center. . .

Umm. . . how about, 'NO.'

They had only set up about two dozen chairs on the ground level, with about ten additional chairs available in the usual parent viewing spot located on the second floor (which overlooks the gymnasium - generally where we watch Abby during practice sessions.)  While adults were jostling for position over these chairs - which were located in the far corner of the gym - I staked out a position on the edge of the hallway that provided a decent vantage position that enabled me to shoot any area of the gym floor without issue.  We still had to stand for an hour-and-a-half, crammed together among strangers, but at least we got some decent pictures.

Anyway, I ended up editing a bunch of pictures I took for some friends of ours, but I didn't get around to editing the pics of our child, so I apologize in advance for the less-than-ideal lighting and graininess (the lighting especially - I hate shooting inside gymnasiums.)  I'm also not captioning these up as much, seeing how they're all pretty self-explanatory.

Check it out, folks. . .

The Midland Gymnastics Center.  This place consistently smells of sweat and stinky feet.

Gymnasts.  There were a few different groups participating during our time slot today (they held exhibitions all day, in order to cut down on audience congestion.)

Abby (in the black and pink long-sleeve leotard), doing some warm-up stretches with her class.

I can do, like, twelve push-ups myself now.  In a row.  I'm pretty proud of this.

Some cartwheels.  The different groups spent some time just going back and forth across this large, carpeted area, switching between various round offs, cartwheels, flips, backbends, summersaults, etc.

Waiting for her turn on whatever the hell this thing is called. . .

Ah, yes. . . it's The Boulder.  I should've known.

On to the next area of the gym (the groups rotated so they weren't all crammed together into one place. . . like their parents and grandparents were.)

Kris gave Alayna her phone in order for Alayna to sneak out closer in order to get some video, but Alayna recorded a lot of video, so the file sizes are too large to upload here.  Again, sorry about that - yell at Blogger, not me.  You can see Abby falling into the foam pit in the background, here.

You can barely see here there in the back, doing some flippity-stuff on the bars (I wish I would've brought a telephoto lens with me.)

Now on to the beams. . . or whatever they're called.

Gotta love the dramatic poses. . .

At the end of the exhibition, they had each girl come up to accept a medal and take a turn posing like this so that their families could take a picture of them.  Most kids held the pose for a few seconds so that folks could have time to snap a few with their phones.  Abby (of course) threw up this pose and immediately turned around to return to her spot on the carpet in about a second. . . pictures and cameras be damned.  Miraculously, my dad was able to capture this at the exact moment she was in the correct pose - there was, like, a nanosecond of room for error with this.

Medals for participation.  Welcome to Midland.

Hopefully next year, if Abby's still into this whole gymnastics thing, Midland Gymnastics can try and order a few more dozen f***ing chairs for people.  My back is killing me.

- Brian