Melissa made the Central Valley Gymnastics Team!

We are so excited for Melissa!  She tried out and made the High School gymnastics team.  She has been jumping on the trampoline since she was born and it has all paid off!  She is so excited.  Actually, she tried out for volleyball in the fall and was so disappointed that she did not get put on the team.  But it allowed her schedule to be free enough to take a gymnastics class and learn some tumbling.  She loves it and is a natural.  Now she is able to use these skills on the high school team.  We are excited to see her in a meet.  Practice every day after school and some Saturdays.  Go Melissa!

Beautiful October Day

On Saturday, Megan had a band competition in Richland and Katie had a XC meet in Kenniwick so we put them on the sports buses and Mike and I headed to Tri-Cities for the day.  (Grateful that those cities are close enough to be Tri...)
It was also conference weekend and we were lucky enough to listen to the morning session on BYU satellite radio.  It was so nice to be on a road trip together, just Mike and I.  Beautiful weather, nice to get away.  We heard the announcement about the change in mission ages, 18 for boys and 19 for girls.  WOW!  We just looked at each other, jaws dropped and speechless!  What a huge change!  Such exciting news.  Tammy texted me immediately.  I texted Katie and Megan who were both on a bus and not listening to conference.  The news spread by word of mouth so quickly.  Neat to witness history that day....

So we headed to Katie's race.  Mike was familiar with how they worked, thankfully.  I have never been to a XC race.  We found Katie and bought a cowbell to be ready to cheer her on.  We saw a lot of friends from CV.  John McLain is a runner and we saw him running.  Then we cheered Katie on!  She had to quit early because of severe pain in her side.  Maybe she will be minus one appendix soon???

As soon as the pain subsided, Katie felt okay about sticking it out for the rest of the meet and riding the bus home with the team rather than leave with us so we headed over to the Marching Band Competition for Megan.

 This was also the first band competition that I had been to.  How fun to watch the different schools (they came from as far as Oregon and Boise) and see their performances.  I love the music and the themes, the performances and the dancing.  Marching band has changed so much since my high school days.  We picked out a bright neon yellow sweatshirt for Megan, but didn't really see much of her until between preliminaries and finals.  It was fun to just be with Mike and enjoy the show.  We had planned to just stay for the preliminaries and then head home.  But with all the excitement of cheering on the band, and then we took a close second place going into finals, we were so charmed and having so much fun that we just couldn't leave.  We stayed and watched 'til the end.  SO MUCH FUN!  So great to feel the CV pride of winning the finals!  I love the Cloaked show, the more I see it, the more I notice the little details that are so fun to see.  Maybe they add to it every week too.  One of the favorite memories of the show.... the wind came up during the first performance - the prelim - and knocked down all the trees.  Some kids from the an other band all went down on the field and physically held up the trees for the 8 minute performance.  Talk about lending a helping hand!  To a fellow competitor!  Such a great bunch of kids.  I love the enthusiasm and nerdiness and just plain goofy joy of the band kids.  I'm so thrilled for Megan.

COLORGUARD!!

Megan has been working so hard at summer band camp and after school practice in her new endeavor - ColorGuard! How fun to have her do what I did in school. I remember the fun of football games and flags and marching with the band. Jenny is doing it too. They get to wear their warm ups to school on the days that they have a game.  Megs has met so many new friends and had such great opportunities to travel and compete.  I helped with the food during one of the competitions and during band camp with Jenna Lake and Heidi Stewart.  We are having fun going to the games on Friday nights to see a terrific half time show!