Finally!

I probably had y'all excited at the beginning of the month, right? What, with my two posts in one week! You probably thought I had made a New Year's resolution to get better at blogging. Well, I didn't make that resolution...but, apparently I should have!

I haven't really had anything going on that's been blog worthy over the last few weeks. But, I was at a skating competition yesterday so I FINALLY have something to blog about.

The competition, which was held in Prescott, was the first competition of the year for two of my girls - Hannah and Alyssa. And, due to some changes that Skate Canada made this year, both of these girls had to move up TWO levels this year. They went from competing at the Stage 5 level of CanSkate, to competing at the Pre-Preliminary level of STARSkate - that probably doesn't mean a lot to most of you, but that's a pretty significant jump!

A pre-competition picture, this was taken as the girls waited for their warm-ups. Alyssa is on the left (she just went south on vacation, so her hair is in braids) and Hannah is on the right.
Alyssa was the first to skate, and she had a really good skate - she had fun and was happy with how she did, that's always what I am concerned about. She ended up placing 5th out of 7 - to which she shrugged her shoulders and said 'I'm OK with that'. She's a mature little girl!

Hannah struggled a bit with her skate. She had a rough warm-up - first, she stopped in the middle of her solo, thinking that the warm up was over, and then she took a fall when practicing her grab - those two things threw her right off, and as a result, she forgot the second half of her solo! She was the first to skate in her flight, so when they announced that the warm-up was over, I only had time for a quick pep talk - she was freaking out because she was afraid she was going to forget the whole thing, I told her that once her music came on, everything would come back to her...and then I hoped for the best?!?! She ended up forgetting only a small section, and she was smart enough to put in a jump and do some turns with arm movements - I was really proud of her for that!

As we watched the flights after her, we saw two other girls go out and forget their solos! However, neither of them handled it as well as Hannah - one just quit and skated off; the other stopped, started to cry, skated to her coach, remembered what she was supposed to do, went back out and finished her solo...all while crying! So, Hannah was able to see for herself that she handled the situation VERY well.

But, despite that, she still placed 7th out of 7 :( It breaks my heart, this poor little girl just doesn't have great luck at competitions.

So, it wasn't the greatest competition, but, it's part of skating and I'm still glad to be a part of it with these girls.

And another pre-competition picture - I told them to be goofy, and this is what I got? They're both doing the started position of their solos. I guess they were 'in the zone' and didn't want to be too goofy :)
We have a 'fun' competition coming up in a few weeks, and these two will be doing a similar pairs number together...I will start choreographing that with them later this week, so we'll be able to have some FUN with that. They deserve it!