Free Range Family

BIG things going on for me in 2015, big and exciting things! :D I had a wonderful weekend with some friends who were town, who are very well known choreographers in the dance world. And I had two super cool things happen to me at work as well. Yes! I am so happy and cannot wait for this year! After all the hard work and the rough year we had in 2013 and 2014, I know that wonderful things were bound to happen this year! I just hope that a new house for our family is ALSO in the cards this year. I will keep praying and keep spreading that good karma! So we will begin with the work news: I was offered to join the YMCA's annual campaign this year. Our annual campaign raises money to provide more memberships, scholarships and healthy lifestyle programs for our community. All of our annual campaign donations help with either our preschool or afterschool programs, our scholarships to families and senior members, our Livestrong program, our Get Started program, our aquatics...

We had our annual winter gymnastics showcase this week, among other crazy things. I also had my first ever fully run show, The Nutcracker, this Friday. Both performances (I should actually say ALL the performances, there were five gymnastics showcases total) went very well. I am so proud of all of my students for working so hard preparing for this performance. I know that it was difficult keeping focused at times, especially with Christmas coming up. But you all did wonderful! Great job! Now that I am done with all of my performances, it is time to actually prepare for Christmas! I am a bit panicked, I still have so much to prepare for! I have to finish getting my presents for Lon, wrap the kiddos' presents, send out Christmas cards and make sure we are all set for Santa. Gah!! I don't really have a lot of time to write this post, so I will be sharing all the lovely skills photos with y'all. Thanks for  always being so understanding! :P Tumble One 5:30 class ...

We ended up getting the car! Its perfect and I love it! It is a silver 1996 Mercedes-Benz with a sun roof. Oh I love it so much! The best part about the whole thing? I bought it 100% by myself. Yep! Paid $3000 in cash and felt like a BOSS! Whoop, whoop! It is so awesome being an adult sometimes. :D I know, its not an apartment… But we are taking baby steps to a better life for our family. First comes a new car, then more hours and more money, then a place to live. Lon and I have a plan made, it will just take some time. Which does suck on the hard days. But on days like today, days when all my hard work has finally paid off, days like today rock! I have yet to really settle into the car, I haven't even cleaned it up or taken a decent photo of it! I had Lon snap a quick one for me this morning (we have to wait until after work before we can get it registered) but I think that it doesn't even do it justice. It just looks so fancy and so nice! How did we get so lucky? Isn...

Oh boy, did I have a busy week! I had a total of five showcase performances, plus a Thriller performance for my Saturday hip hop class! How crazy! I cannot believe that next week is Halloween and everything that comes with it: Alan's preschool Halloween party, Healthy Halloween at my work and trick or treating! It is just insane! We need to finish up the last few things on the kiddos costumes! And get pumpkins! Gah, its all coming up so fast! Tumble 1 5:30 class My younger Tumble 1 class did wonderful! They performed two floor routines (a boys routine and a girls routine) and a beam routine for their friends and family. I also passed four out of eight of my kids to Tumble 2, literally half of the class! Even the ones who are staying in Tumble 1 still progressed so much in the 7 weeks of class. Good job kids, you all worked so hard! I am very proud of all of you. Hope to see you next class. Above is a photo of Miss Ariel and I doing a skills pose with the kids. Tumble 1 ...

I have had a lot of people asking me this over the summer and even more so now that Alan's birthday is coming up (4 more days). So I figured rather then repeat myself a billion and two times (like I have done thus far), I would just write about it on here. If you have been a follower of this blog for years, you probably already know why but this is for those new-comers who have just joined us! Why are we not putting Alan in Kindergarten this year?????? Well, for several reasons actually… #1- Our school district's cutoff is September 10th, just five short days before Alan's birthday. By all technicality he could attend Kindergarten this year but personally I feel that is too close for him to succeed in school. He would be four years old for the first week and a half of school, and that scares me. I feel that the district cutoff date should be on the day that school starts but I do understand that doing so would mean that the district would have to change the cutoff da...

My summer classes are officially over! Yay! It was a wonderful summer, I loved all of my classes and my camps. But it is nice to have this upcoming week off of dance and gymnastics, so that I can prepare Alan for his last year of Preschool and get in some fun family time before he off and leaves us three days a week. He starts school September 3, so we have the whole week off next week to get in some summer fun! I plan on taking Alan and Anna to go swimming, to the library, to as many parks as we can fit in and somewhere else fun too, maybe the zoo or the art museum? Not sure yet! Saturday was my last showcase for the summer, it was my lovely hip hoppers performance! We performed three dances: a breakdancing dance to one of my favorite Incubus songs, a "follow the lyrics" type dance called Born to Move, and of course the YMCA for our finale dance. It was a wonderful performance, we had a decent turnout and all of my kids danced really well! Alan came along to watch his ...

What a week, wow! We finished our last performance from theatre camp last night. We performed our show twice, once for our ABT guests at the Bair and once for our members at the YMCA Youth Commons Area. Both performances were amazing, the kids worked so hard this week! Dr. William was telling us all before the show that it usually takes up to 4 weeks for actors to learn their lines and songs in a show, not one week! We learned five songs, three dances and speaking lines in only 5 days! Dang! Those kids sure do rock! :D During the dress rehearsal The theme of this year's show was American Musical Theatre. We talked about the composers of American Musical Theatre, the differences in songs between American music and British music. We even discussed the time periods of each musical. The songs that we performed were Oklahoma, He is an Englishman, One Singular Sensation, The March of the Siamese Children and Camelot. My favorite was obviously One Singular Sensation, I absolutely ...

I have been a total ball of stress this past month. In just August, I have had over six different performances, ranging from my gymnastics to cheer to theatre to hip hop. I had three gymnastics performances this week alone. It has been wild! To put it frankly, I am exhausted. So I will leave you all with some photos from our performances. These kids are beasts! They worked so hard, I am so proud of them! Tumble 1 6:30 class I forgot to take photos of my 5:30 class but here are my older kids. These kids worked so hard! I passed all five of them to Tumble 2! Great job guys! :D This session we did something different, instead of just doing a beam routine and a floor routine, we also did a vault routine too. It was a change, but I definitely like it. So I think we may keep it in our program showcase! Tumble 2  My Tumble 2 kids did wonderful as well. I made the executive decision to keep them in Tumble 2, to better perfect their skills. This level is much harder th...

I had my spring showcase this past weekend. It was the YMCA's second annual showcase, this time the ballet classes joined up with us! We had 5 classes, 31 kids and eight dances total. It was quite the little recital! One of our dance teachers was retiring, so I had all of her students sign a card and we gave her flowers. I am very proud of all of my kids for doing their best and making this recital amazing! We had a weekend full of practice, team building and performances! We started out the weekend with four hours of dress rehearsal. I helped for the whole rehearsal, but each class only came for 45 minutes. Each class rehearsed the finale with the other class for 15 minutes then worked on their own dances for the other half hour. I loved helping at the rehearsal, I know most of the girls in the dance program, through subbing and them being in other programs with me. I love them all so much! Its great to get to work with all the students, not just my own kids. Plus they were ...

It was a week full of showcases for my gymnastics class! I was quite excited for my girls! Our week started out with the Tumble Bears showcase. Only two of my three girls were there but I had passed all of them to Tumble 1 once they turned five years old. They were all quite excited! My showcase floor are prepared for my students My girls did such a great job! They are twins and were surprisingly quite nervous. For my Tumble Bears classes, we just show each skill one at a time.They aren't quite old enough to remember and perform a whole routine yet, especially if this is their first year in gymnastics. Regardless, they executed each gymnastics skill perfectly! I am so proud of them! They had quite the audience too, with their parents, aunt and cousins all there! It was a decent sized audience, but they didn't care once we had begun. Great job girls! I hope to see you in class next week! We all matched that day too lol! Awesome! Tuesday night, I had two gymnastics sh...