Region 1 Championships

Let me take a pause from all the Saudi blogging and rewind back to the end of April. Knowing this would be Kaiya's last meet (forced "retirement" due to our move to Saudi- there's no competitive gymnastics here) I splurged and paid for professional photographs by the on-site photographer at the competition. While they aren't the greatest of quality, it's much better than I would've been able to capture on my iPhone.

I now want to shamelessly brag about my amazing daughter. Gymnastics is a tough sport. It's physically demanding...it's emotionally demanding. And it's year round- there's no 3-4 month long season and then you're done until the following year. Kaiya trained up to 20 hrs/wk for 5 days/week. That is a huge time commitment for a young girl. She was often picked up from school and driven straight to practice (she's an expert at changing in the car). Dinner was always late at night, eaten during the car ride home. She squeezed in homework either before school or late at night after gym...and always managed to pull straight A's. She sacrificed "friend" time for "gym" time. Kaiya is pretty much the most awesome 13 yr old (biased parent here). When we were trying to decide about Saudi, gymnastics was a big concern knowing that Kaiya wouldn't be able to continue in the sport. We knew Kaiya wasn't loving it as much as she used to (she had a couple of injuries during the past year)...but I knew she'd continue if we stayed b/c she wasn't ready to leave the sport quite yet. Obviously, you know what we chose to do- but Kaiya "retiring" early is bittersweet- for her & us. I'm really grateful for all of the great coaches and gyms that trained her over the years...and the opportunities it gave her to go outside her comfort zone and learn about hard work, failure, success, and discipline. I can't wait to see what she chooses to do next.