I am not that sad that Gymnastics is over, I am really looking forward to Cheer!
He Said
We never would have dreamed (or wanted) her Gymnastics career to come to end like it has, but unfortunately here we are with an officially retired gymnast. She had two competitions this season that she trained three quarters of the season for. The first, in Whitby happened a month and half ago and the second – and final one of her career – was to go last weekend. Understandably it was postponed with a highly likely caveat that it might be cancelled depending the severity of the COVID-19 virus at some point. Well, that news finally came on Wednesday this week when Gymnastics Ontario announced that all postponed and future events were cancelled.
And with that her gymnastics career came to and end. I think Danielle & I are more broken up over it than Emelia. Emelia has already moved on emotionally to Cheer and has the excitement over that. I would have loved if she had the one last competition to close out the career. The one in Whitby we thought she did well, but Emelia ever the perfectionist had a good idea of what she needed to do to place even better and I would have loved for her to have one more crack at some more podium placings and medals. I am happy that she is moving on to another sport, and one that will push her shyness aside but one that will give her even more experience with team, trust and relying on each other. And one that will give her all sort of activity, fitness and strength building.
The weeks are starting to settle into what little of a routine we can get into. This week with the guidance of school and Emelia’s amazing teachers we will have a bit of a curriculum for her to follow. After a few weeks of taking it easy, we will see how hard it will be to get her back into a routine for learning. I anticipate some pushback and resistance at first but hopefully that will be short lived and we can avoid threats and conditions. Though with how it has been this past week with the mere suggestion of school work I don’t think we will be so lucky.
As for work for me, we’ve got a bit of routine built around this working from home and I have really been enjoying the regular connection with our store team. There hasn’t been a moment since we closed the store to protect both our team and our customers where I haven’t been overwhelming proud of who I work for and the value we put in our people. I can’t say I see the same for everyone else unfortunately as a lot of people we know have been laid off or let go from their companies. I can’t imagine what that stress is like and I am so happy we don’t have to experience that!
She said
This new normal is mentally exhausting. We are starting to get more into a routine but really miss what was our old normal life. We are more and more isolated and we can feel it especially for Emelia. Being an only child there isn’t siblings to keep the cabin fever at bay. We are trying our best to assure we get out for long walks around the neighbourhood daily. Most people in our area seem to be taking the social distancing guidelines very seriously so we are only seeing people go on walks only with their families and people are being very mindful of having extreme distances between them.
Every day there is more on the news about deaths, infections and it is down right scary at times. Mentally we (I) have to turn away from the news because all that is on 24/7 is COVID-19. There have been updates from the government with more restrictions to try and control the spread. But the genie is out of the bottle and it is now about how much we can control the number of infections. It’s scary. We are trying our best to keep Emelia informed while also remembering she’s a child, and an anxious one at that.
Emelia has been handling things pretty well. There have been moments of extreme emotions over the last week but for the most part she’s handling things as well as we can expect. Our new normal has kept us close to home and I am currently the only one who does any family errands and leaving the house for any supplies in stores. And even those are very minimal. We are limiting our trips to the grocery store to max once a week.
With stricter restrictions and likely more to come we have had to think long and hard how to keep Emelia active and entertained for the foreseeable future. For years Emelia has been begging for a trampoline. For years the answer has been no, I had the daycare and we have an insanely tiny yard. Well with other areas going on full lockdown expect to go to the grocery store and pharmacy we felt we had to get ahead of things. So we measured out and have not ordered the largest trampoline that will fit in our tiny yard. Problem its not a typical size which means it was more than we hoped to spend (I am going on EI) and it is not easy to find. We finally found one on Amazon and how have to wait for what could be a few weeks or more for it to arrive.
Emelia is very excited for it to arrive and hopefully this will give her the space she needs to practice her skills while keeping her active. So we are going to be essentially saying good-bye to our tiny yard but we will have a very happy girl! That is it for me this week. It’s been a heavy week, new reality sinking in and heavy hearts that Emelia’s gymnastics career ended not in the way we had hoped. But we are staying healthy so far and we have each other, a roof over our heads and lots of love inside those 4 walls.