The ATL Gives Me Internet

We arrived in Atlanta today. The weather is forgiving; a non-murderous 77 degrees. I was expecting one billion degrees more than that. And Maya? Maya is much better. About 87%. She is spunky and funny again, showing signs of her regular non-stop energy but a deep cough persists. And she tires easily. It took the last two full days for her to find some focus again. Our moods - Husband & mine -- are on egg shells, however. We can't seem to fully squash the disappointment at how this flu has set her back. It seems so unfair that after all this work we have to make up for 10 days with a frustrated child athlete that doesn't completely understand why her body doesn't respond like it did. It's unfair that she now has to work even harder, mentally especially. We're worried most about her sparring. Two minutes a round doesn't seem like a lot, but with the adrenaline and a catalog of strategy scrolling through the mind and an entire professional football stadium watching, a fighter loses their breath quickly even without the flu stuck in their chest. We told Maya that maybe she should change her whole strategy to Crazy Kid, and just come out screaming, swinging haymakers and cough on them, get her opponent genuinely scared. Maybe the word would spread around The Dome about the Crazy Girl from California. Worth a shot.

Even though she competes Sunday, we went by the Georgia Dome today to pick up her credentials and to weigh her in. Walking into the stadium was exhilarating. It was thick with Junior Olympic fever. The fourteen through seventeen year olds were competing today, and I love how child athletes size each other up, especially the younger ones. They conspicuously stare and wonder. Then they awkwardly say hi or pretend like they didn't see each other.

We were worried about the weigh in . . . During Maya's qualifier, she was only one pound away from the top of her weight class. Had she gone over during these last six weeks, she wouldn't have been able to compete. This was a dilemma that Husband and I wanted to handle with the most gentle of gloves. Our goal was to keep her at a certain weight, even during growth spurts, without making a big deal of it, without her knowing even so this would not become a real concern for her. Working out more for training helped. The fact that she doesn't eat a lot of junk really helped. And, well, thanks to this flu, today she weighed in two pounds less than her qualifier. Which, you know, worked out well (I guess), but doesn't really help with her strength. When you weigh in the 70's, two pounds is significant. More TKD updates Sunday.

The other reason I'm really excited about being in Atlanta is that tomorrow my family is hanging out with Andrea of hula seventy and her family! How perfect is that?

In unpacking news, I'm missing some vital stuff. I'm down to the last boxes and I haven't found some things that are important enough for me to notice. Like, the box that contained the rice cooker and the blender. My precious blender -- WWWAAAAA! How am I supposed to make my drinkable dressing or my chocolate greens shake? This upsets me. The other box missing is the one with my tweezers, all of my just-in-case-I-need-to-dress-in-drag make up and uh, my boxes of disposable contact lenses. Whoops. The make up? Feh, I can live without neon royal blue shadow -- for now -- but the tweezers and the lenses? Kind of important. Ok, I splurged for some tweezers yesterday and to be honest, I like how I look in glasses. I just don't like the way I feel in them. I get headaches easily while wearing them and I feel like my world is only three-feet deep. I feel like a box has encapsulated my head. Which is why I almost never wear them, but this weekend in Atlanta I will be bespectacled in a prescription so old that not only will I not hear well, but I'll be tapping Husband every 2 minutes to have him tell me what just happened in the sparring ring. *SIGH*.