We got everything ready then headed downstairs for the free hotel breakfast. They had omelets made to order, pancakes, bacon/eggs/sausage, yogurt, and the usual muffins, cereal, donuts, bagels, fruit, you name it they had it. They even had cokes. All the food and drink you can manage at no charge other than having a room at the hotel there. Pretty good! Too bad I can't hardly eat first thing in the morning...but I gave it the ole college try. ;)
Finally it was time to trek over to the Convention Center and see if we could find our crew. That meant walking through several "gerbil tubes" as we called them. It's really kind of neat how downtown Indianapolis has so much connected indoors. The hotels around there all have tubes to the skywalk, the mall, the restaurants, the convention center, it's all connected, which is *great* since you don't have to go outside or drive to try to get to anything around there. So we walked through the hotel, through the mall, through a parking garage, and over the skywalk until we made it into the center, where we now had no idea which way to go. We managed to find it, and I was quite pleased to find other little cheerleaders in the same outfit down there. Success. :) There was also some NFL draft thing going on today, and the gymnastics meet too, so the Convention Center really was pretty busy.
They did their stretching, got the glitter in their hair (thanks Michaele) :), and scoped out the competition while the parents put glitter in the kids' hair, paid $12 to get in to watch them, and scoped out the competition. There were a *lot* of teams there today. The sheet listed about 50 competition groups from all over the country-one group even came in from Hawaii today to be there. The most fascinating part of the process for me was watching the preparations the other groups were going through. We saw a couple of women Sewing their kids' hair. Thick string stuff on a big dull needle thing going in and out of hair to sew it in place with brown thread. One group had all the girls with their hair in these teeny tiny tight curls. It looked almost alien on a couple of them. I'm trying to picture getting Kaylee's hair to stay that way, and failing miserably. EVEN if I could figure out how to do that, which is a great big "yeah right", her hair would fall flat in 10 minutes or less, just like mine used to on curls. No. Way. Shellacking it with hair spray or anything else doesn't help. Trust me. Been there, Done that. And then there was the make-up. Steve, Greg, Michaele and myself had no longer finished commenting on the make-up, when an elderly black lady also made a similar comment. Something along the lines of "Teaching your kids how to look like prostitutes at the earliest possible age." Our group of girls didn't wear make-up, but we saw kids as young as 3 or 4 years old covered in red lipstick, blush, eyeshadow, etc. I suppose it's like ballet, and if you're "on stage" and you wear make-up to be able to distinguish faces from a distance, okay. But it still gives me the creeps.
Kaylee said while they were waiting for their turn to go, they were watching the other teams practice, and seeing if they were better than that or not. One girl said that their team was going to "lose" because another was doing back handsprings and they didn't have any of those. Of course that other team had 10-year-olds or so on there too, so fair is fair. :)
We got our seats in the gymnasium, which was surrounded on three sides by bleachers with
very comfortable individual seats instead of the benches. Nice! Our group, the "Hot Shots", was 6th in line to go on the schedule, and they were listed as "Exhibition". There were several categories in the competition, and this age group was exhibition only, and got to go first. Since it wasn't competition, not much was said, but we think that the Hot Shots group would take first or second in that category, depending on how things were scored. The other good team had a few older kids in it, and they had a couple of trickier stunts/lifts. They also had fewer people to coordinate, fewer overall different parts to their routine, and smaller lifts. So I don't know how that would work. But our girls did Very well. Kaylee didn't even try to find us in the crowd today-she just went out there with this look of concentration on her face and gave it her best shot. Later she said she didn't try to find us because she wanted to do her best and focus on what she was doing. There ya go. :)There was this one memorable routine done by a group of TINY little buggers. Like all three-
year-olds or something. One little boy, the rest little girls, and they all wore matching shorts and t-shirts, not cheer skirt things. (And no, no make-up!) And they did a Fantastic job. Those little things mostly couldn't do the gymnastics stunts, but they modified it so they were doing "forward rolls" (formerly known as "somersaults") in place of cartwheels, and for their lifts they had one girl on her stomach on the floor and a 'spotter' helping another girl climb up on her back and lift her arms up. It was very creative, and those kids must have practiced forever to do it as well as they did at that age. I was impressed, and it was really cute. Other than my own, naturally, they were my favorites.After Kaylee's turn, we met back up and headed out to the hotel to check out and grab lunch. The hotel more than made up for our free breakfast with our lunch. ;) All Kaylee wanted was a jumbo shrimp cocktail, so that's what she ordered, to the apparent surprise of the waitress and another worker who walked by. The second lady said "Oh, what a neat drink they did up for you!" Then she paused and said "Is that Shrimp? Lawsamercy, I've never seen that before. You're a one in a million kid, aren't ya!"
From there we meandered our way home. The parking garage at that hotel is AWFUL by the way. The entrance was so narrow people had scraped their way into it over and over, as evidenced by the paint marks left on the sides/poles. The hotel won't park your car either, and now I know why. I don't *want* them parking my car in a place like that. One guy had to back up and maneuver around just to turn a corner in there, and when I went to leave, turning that corner in my car gave me pause. Anything much bigger than my car through there would be a Very Bad Deal. Reminded me of what the hotel parking guy did to Chuck's truck over in Ohio. Now I see where that can happen, and we made a mental note that any future times we allow a hotel valet to move our vehicle, we are inspecting it prior to driving away.
Well, we're home again-Kaylee's in the bathtub, Steve's on the deck with a friend and I'm doing laundry, unpacking bags, writing this big old blog entry, and putting up (what else) the Pictures From The Day. I, being of mostly sound mind and overly sound body, do declare that for some unknown reason I was Not in the mood to take photos, and therefore didn't really get that many of the night before, the actual competition, etc. Weird, unlike me, but true. But what I did get is up, so you can check them out if you wish. :)
Oh! When we arrived home, we found our cat Dulce on the deck. This is very bad, because all the food, water, and litterboxes were inside this time. She had apparently sneaked out the last time someone came out, and hid, and she is one lucky kitty that we were only gone about 24 hours instead of 5 days to a week like we have fairly regularly. She was SO glad to see us. But here's the part that gets us. She had not gone to the bathroom on the deck. Not that we can find. She is the kitty that has *never* caused us a problem in that arena, and in the one time it would have been understandable and okay, she just couldn't do it. She held it until we got home. Poor little thing. Fortunately like I said, we weren't gone long, she had water from condensation on the windows, but no food or bathroom for almost a day. I think she was never happier to see a door open in her life. :O :)
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