Flipping Saturday

Today we had a momentous occasion at Maddie’s Team Edge practice.   For the first time ever, Maddie did a forward flip, without using her hands!  Yes, there was a lot of flipping practice for this, and every flipping kid there was a little nervous, but when the flipping time came, they all did their flipping duty and had a great flipping time!  It was great watching Madison’s progress over the course of this particular exercise - she was nervous for the first run, which resulted in a forward roll or summersault.  Next time, however, she went for it.  She had the mat there to land on, and once she felt comfortable with that, she tried to pull it off.  It was her second attempt that really impressed me - she got her courage up, and just went for it!  And she did great too.  Her next time was even better, impressing the instructor!  She hadn’t done this before, so it was a big moment!

The rest of the practice consisted of synchronized performances with the staff, or with other students, other weapons.  There was a good deal of physical fitness exercises too, and eventually… dodgeball.  Yes, this isn’t exactly related to taekwondo.  Unless you want to consider evasive maneuvers and so forth.  It was just a nice team building exercise, and a bit of a release for the kids to have a good time, which they did!

It was a hot day today, which meant nothing outside so much.  I wasn’t wanting to go to the pool in the direct sunlight tonight, and the pool looked pretty crowded today.  We’ll head back later, I think.  So today we were doing a speck of honest pirating by plugging in Disney Infinity and returning to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” game.  We used Crystal Jack and regular Jack, so we had multiple Jacks in the game, running through from the start to finish.  We almost finished the whole thing, in fact.  It was just old-fashioned pirating fun!

Mom was working outside early, working on her planted arrangement.  It took a good part of the morning, but the end result was rather nice.  It will grow in, and look really nice as it does.  We were outside tonight, just sitting under the canopy and listening to all the birds in the woods behind us, and it was so pleasant.  A hummingbird came up to the feeder, and I got a picture of it, but not the best one - I was wanting to take a picture of a hummingbird this season.

It’s an elusive thing for me.  This one wasn’t quite in focus, but I finally got a picture of one. I’ve seen some great shots online, and eventually I’ll get a good picture of a hummingbird.  It’s a matter of time!

On the treadmill, I was walking POV through the Caribbean Resort at Disney, mainly because we were doing the pirate thing lately.  We stayed there some time ago, and that was nice.  It’s changed quite a bit though.  I’m planning on heading back to Arches National Park soon enough with the POV walks, reminiscing and exploring new trails while I’m at it.  I've longed to be back to those places for so many years. 

Tonight we watched an old movie from 2010, a modern update of “Gulliver's Travels.”  It was a pretty fun movie, one we hadn’t see before.  We got to bed early though, heading upstairs to study lines for the skit tomorrow.  Maddie and I will be onstage at KidPak again, reprising our characters for this ongoing series.  It’s been super fun, and so much better than last time we did it.  I’m loving “Storm Chasers.”

After that, it was our reading time, and we kept up with “Kingdom Keepers III,” of course.  It won’t be long before I’ll be changing that to a “IV,” as Maddie will want to read that one next, won’t you Maddie?

It was a good day today, and a nice little landmark day for Maddie.  One of those reasons I keep the blog is to mark those little landmarks, and although I don’t have a photo, we have the date and the memory of it.  Maddie was a little dizzy coming off that flip, but everyone was all smiles and all thumbs up.  Great job!