I've somehow become one of those insane parents who does nutty things like drive their kid an hour for a private tumbling lesson. It's a suuuuuuper long story how I ended up there, but Little Miss Won't Do It Unless She is Perfect has tried my patience enough for me to stalk a coach that knows how to deal with her nonsense. ANYWAY, after a break that made no dang sense, there's a kid back to doing arabians and standing tucks and all that.
And then there's the other kid. Mila is generally my sidekick in all things that involve waiting for Alexis. She's my entertainment and the thing that makes me insane. She had been tagging along for those tumbling lessons and then it happened. The Best Coach Ever was all like, "Y'know, she can jump on the trampolines and I can help her learn how to do a cartwheel" and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh. Now there's two of them doing private lessons. (It's worth noting that the drive an hour thing also equates to WAY CHEAPER THAN ANYTHING IN PITTSBURGH. Yay!)
So back when she's was two or three, Mila did the gymanstics things and loved it. There was just one problem - she kept wandering off. She would be an active participant in class one minute and then five miles away the next (that might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one). The coach didn't notice she had left two weeks in a row and I called it quits. Mila was cool with it because she decided she wanted to dance anyway, so it all worked out.
But then she got to take a private lesson. And then she COMPLETELY PAID ATTENTION THE ENTIRE TIME OMG. Like, super paid attention. The kid was more focused than I've ever seen. The. Entire. Time. And then she jumped on the trampolines during Alexis' lesson and then practiced all the drills she had learned and basically, I think Mila has figured out how to do the same thing for more than 10 minutes straight? I didn't think she would ever master that skill.
She's still really terrible at cartwheels, but it doesn't matter because the whole thing amounts to an hour and a half of her running and jumping and not driving me insane. And that, my friends, is a win.