Great news at the doctor and physical therapist yesterday! Hannah's ankle is healed and she is ready to start adding skills back in as she continues to work on strengthening her ankle. I am afraid it will be a longer and slower road than Caroline would like it to be, but she is going to have to understand the importance of taking it slow and not re injuring herself. The doctor said it takes at least twice as long as you were in the cast to begin to get back to do the things you normally do; and that is for someone just wanting to get back to walking and maybe running. For an athlete, he said to plan on 3 to 4 times that long. She was in the cast for 4 weeks.  The good and bad of having her season cut short this year are many. An  obvious "bad" is that her season was cut short and that has been very disappointing. The "good" is that she has plenty of time to heal and come back stronger. It is a lot for a 14 year old to process, but a good life lesson.

Where to start?

I have not ever done anything like this before and am not sure where to begin. My daughter is 14 years old and is a level 9 gymnast. For a few years now, I have thought about blogging about being the mother of a competitive gymnast, but several things held me back. The first being, I don't write well. Another valid reason is  grammar is not a strong point of mine. These hurdles made the prospect of blogging more than a little intimidating. I am being honest about these downfalls from the beginning, so if you can't stand to read bad writing with grammatical errors then I recommend passing over this blog. I used lack of time as an excuse not to do this as well, but a little time has been freed up on my schedule due to my daughter's competitive season being cut short by a broken ankle. The combination of a little time and the desire to share the ups and downs of this crazy sport  have come together for me so I am going to give it a try. Read at your own risk ;)

I feel I should explain the broken ankle. Of course it happened at a competition.It happened on the vault. She had a fluke landing on a tsuk (if you don't know gymnastics and are interested in what this is you can Google"tsukahara vault"). Honestly, when it happened it did not look that bad. I thought she might have broken her toe. Thankfully, vault was her last event at this competition. My daughter has a very high pain tolerance and a history of not admitting to pain and injury. True to form, she walked away from the vault and told her coach she was fine. We did not know until after the awards ceremony and saw the baseball on her ankle that it did not look good. Long story short, she fractured the fibula and also had an avulsion fracture (a piece of bone is torn away with a torn tendon or ligament). This all happened at the end of February, so she has already endured 4 weeks in a cast and currently has a brace. She has begun physical therapy and has been going to the gym regularly for strength conditioning, stretching, and has been swinging some bars with no landings. She is healing well.

It was extremely difficult for Hannah to accept that her competitive season was over. She had worked very hard this past fall to get to level 9. She had many adjustments to make as we had changed gyms in September (which is a story for another day),  fears to overcome with learning new skills, and had put in a lot of hours. Thankfully, she has not ever had a serious injury in her 7 years of competitive gymnastics, but that did not make it any easier to accept that she would not be going to the state meet and would have no chance of making regionals. I think she has finally come around to the fact that she has to let all that go and look at the bright side. The bright side being that she has plenty of time to heal, get stronger, and be more than ready for next season. Hannah has handled all of this with grace and a great attitude. I could not be more proud of her.

I think I am off to a good start with this. I hope so anyway. As I have been writing this I decided it would be best to keep our identity anonymous. Some of the other things I hope to discuss at some point through this blog are the friendships I have made through this sport and how important they have been, the relationships with other mothers that have not gone so well, the crazy things we do for our kids, how we have dealt with the good times and the bad, coaches, booster clubs, mean girls, nice girls, to push or not to push, and anything else that comes to mind. The more I thought about discussing these types of issues in this type of forum it seemed best to leave names out. So the names I use will be fictional, although the situations will be real. Stay tuned if you are interested, and let me know your thoughts,stories, and questions. The one thing I know for sure is that gymnastics is a tough sport. Both physically and emotionally, for the kids and for the parents. Without the other moms I couldn't do it. We are in this together!