All About the Girl

Today was pretty much all Kaylee's day, at least from after school let out on.

She is getting more particular about her appearance, and this morning I fixed her hair in double ponytails (pigtails) that were low and brought them to her front, and she has long hair now, and it made her look like almost a teenager. :O

I picked her up from school and took her right to Chuck E Cheese. This was a reward for her for two things-passing into Level Two in gymnastics, and accomplishing something in memorization for Awanas that I didn't actually think she could do. I told her if she could, I'd take her to Chuck E Cheese, and I figured maybe she could do it in the 3 hours before it was time to go. Instead, she got it done in less than an hour. She was excited because it meant she went to Chuck E Cheese, but she doesn't realize that it means that I now know she can do what she's always fought doing, as long as her motivation is there. Well, now that I know she can, she's going to have to, motivation or not! She's busted, she just doens't know it yet. ;) Anyway, today I took her to Chuck E Cheese, where she spent a couple of hours and $25 of my bucks, and had a great time. She "won" a $5 blue puffy ball with green tips out of all of that, and felt like she'd won $1 million. ;) That's good enough.

I took her home, threw her in her cheerleader clothes, and took her to Awanas where I signed her up for the Sparks-A-Rama event. They only have three practices before the "event", and she had to miss most of today's, but at least she got to practice a couple of the games and get signed up. It was funny, the kids kind of gravitated to her in her cheerleader outfit, bow and all. She showed off a little, doing the splits and several running cartwheels. She's not used to being the one in the room who is the best at that stuff, so she kind of liked it.

In the middle of the practice, I had to take her out and run her to the last basketball game of the season at Eastern High School in Greentown. She did her thing, and afterwards had to hand out fliers to the audience, and then finally we got home almost at 9 p.m. after a quick stop at Walgreens for emergency toothpaste and milk. We were all out as of this morning. :) So she had a VERY busy day, from getting up this morning at 7 a.m. to go to school and not getting home until almost 9 p.m. My day wasn't even that busy, poor kid.

One thing I noticed-the cheerleaders at the school tonight, my word. More than 70% of the girls had diamond stud nose rings, and all but one of the guys who hung out with them had pierced ears with big diamond studs in each ear. One girl had a big diamond stud under her lower lip above her chin. Ick. Sorry Kaylee, there is no way on this green earth that you are getting a nose piercing or a lower lip piercing while you live in this house, whether cheerleader 'friends' think it's cool or not. Ick.

Another thing I noticed. I can appreciate the routines that the girls do to music and with choreography. But the regular cheerleaders who clap and chant on the sidelines? I really hope Kaylee is out of cheering by then. I...don't like like it. I've never liked it. I used to joke that Kaylee could be anything but a cheerleader. So what does she like? Cheerleading. I swear it is irony. I don't need her to be exactly like me, I want her to be herself, to find her own path, but cheerleading?? *sigh* I'm working on it, okay??

It'll be a busy weekend-Kaylee has her National Cheerleading Competition down in Indianapolis on Sunday, and on Saturday we're going down there anyway for a friends' party...