My daughter's artistic gymnastics journey started when she was five and a half. One rainy morning I woke up with a feeling that it's time for her to embrace sports. My approach, however, wasn't standard. Instead of signing up my 5-year-old for different types of sports, I pulled out my iPad, opened the YouTube app, and searched for every activity I could think of: tennis, ballet, boxing (as suggested by her daddy:), karate, ballroom dancing, softball, and gymnastics. My daughter loved ballet, and said that she wanted to learn to dance in those gorgeous shiny dresses. But that was until she tapped on one of suggested links that by pure accident appeared to be about gymnastics. After she saw a then popular video of a 9-year-old girl
flipping on the trampolines - that was it. She kept tapping on more and more gymnastics videos saying that she doesn't understand HOW those amazing flips were possible. Then she added that she's afraid she'd never be able to do any of those.. That was the last peaceful day in our apartment. The very next morning I called a nearby gymnastics club, and took my daughter to her first gymnastics trial class.
Clumsy handstands, sloppy cartwheels, and falling apart bridges was all she did for the next few months. But guess what: they did get better and better, and soon her cartwheel looked so perfect that her coach said it was the best one she's ever seen in a recreational class. Another small victory: probably because of fear, when asked to do a handstand turn on a low beam ,my poor baby looked so tight that it actually came out really good. Her coach took her by hand, and walked her to a group of older girls, then asked my daughter to do a handstand turn again. As she was turning, the coach stated: "See how tight she is? This is what I want you to look like on your beam dismount". I had no idea what this whole thing meant then, but wasn't I blooming inside.
...TO BE CONTINUED...
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