Rank Camp 2020

We started Rank Camp this morning, and I stuck around to take a few snaps of the entire first class.  This above is just a game time set up before things really got going, and you can see Madison there in the midst of another obstacle course.

Basically, there are at least fifteen classes before the rank advancement, and the nature of this week is that the students do three classes each day.  Madison has determined to do the afternoon classes as well on Tuesday and Thursday, so in total, she'll have gone to seventeen classes over the course of these next five days.  Yes, that should be fairly exhausting!

She's determined to get her belt though, determined to advance another rank, and the hope is that by Friday, we'll be a part of a ceremony where Madison gets a red belt.  How great is that!?

The class was sold out, which is also great!  We were so happy to see all the students wanting to sign up for this week, and so happy to see new students show up as well.  How great to see things spring to life again!

Madison had a great day today, and the week looks to be unforgettable.  She's working hard, and she's with friends, and she's so happy to be here.  We're happy to have her there too.

We hit a small snag though at KidPak.  We're waiting for the test results, but one of our interns was taken to the ER last night with a 102 fever.  The testing is for the virus, and suddenly, we're all back at home again, away from the office.  We've all been exposed to this person, and each other, and suddenly we're back to where we were in March.  Even worse, for a time we were thinking we'd have to pull Madison from this camp.

BUT... here we go again with updated information about the virus.  Just today - and just in time - we find out that all this time: "From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual."  

This information is from the World Health Organization, which seems to be figuring things out at about the same time we do.  But pair that information with the information we got earlier from the Center for Disease Control that told us not to worry about the virus sticking around on surfaces so much.  Yes, translated that means we shut everything down in this country for nothing.  Of course, we didn't know this back then.  We just kept erring on the side of caution, thinking the worst, while forcing certain places to shut down forever.  One of the restaurants we like to go to in Gainesville, one we've frequented for years now?  It's gone.  So are a lot of other places, like Pier 1 Imports, and recently we discovered that JCPenny will be closing at Lakeshore Mall.

It's sad.  But the news about asymptomatic people was good for one thing:  Madison is going to Rank Camp the rest of the week.  And I'm done with masks right now.

Regardless, we're still forced to work at home again, for the safety of everyone and so on.  We're exposed, and we're going to stay home until Bailee's test results come back.  Firstly, we're praying she's okay simply because we want her to be better.  But the more pressing concern is, of course, if she had the virus or not.  If it is a positive test result, there will be many negative implications.

Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope in all of this.  Consider if this happened two days ago, I said.  If she was taken to the hospital then, we'd not be able to film this weekend, and we filmed a LOT.  Daddy alone has filmed 9 separate videos, and Josh did some as well.  We'd be in a big hole.  So that's good news there.  And there wasn't anything planned for today, so that's good news too.  We'll be okay - we just keep moving forward, no matter what.

Tonight, we all went to bed earlier.  But first, we sat down to watch "Thor:  The Dark World," followed by the episode of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." that immediately follows it, the one called "The Well."  We hadn't actually seen the two back-to-back like that, and it was fun having another Marvel night together.

But we were ready for bed fairly quickly after that.  We read from "Artemis Fowl" tonight, and we said our prayers too.  It should be fairly obvious who we were praying for tonight, with Ba-Ba's second week of chemo going on, and Bailee's recovering and testing on our minds.  She was around a lot of people planning Forward Conference and Summer Xtreme, and that of course is concerning.  We go from fear to faith to fear to faith again.  We just have to remember to feed our spirits with the right thing - faith.  We can't keep watching the news or reading social media.  It's the message we started at with all of this mess:  Faith Over Fear.