All Over (but Yum!)

Hyper-emotional times over here... Please be in prayer re: unspoken prayer requests for several of my friends going through gut-wrenching situations (and two small things for us, in comparison! #perspective)

Adding to the emotion: last weekend was Annelise’s last allstar cheer competition of the season with this team. No Summit bid this year. It was incredibly bittersweet.

She did an amazing job and looked fantastic; but again, this is a team sport – the entire team didn’t hit zero together, either day, so the results were obviously not how everyone wanted to go out. :’( Add to this the fact that our cheer gym is about to experience a sad mass exodus based on parents upset re: the way certain things were handled this season; plus, all of Annelise’s closest friends are leaving allstar altogether for high school cheer. The state governing body for Texas school activities (UIL) has changed the eligibility rules for high school cheer for this next year; the requirements are as such that you really can’t swing doing both, so her friends are all fully committing to high school cheer, instead. (I love & respect this and secretly hope Annelise makes the same decision in a few years!) But it still hurts for us right now to be losing ~10 hours of regular, scheduled contact with our closest friends here each week...esp. when we don’t know how this next allstar season is going to shake out for us, with Annelise being one of the few athletes at her level left in our gym. We’ve discussed this situation very openly, and she’s adamant that she wants to stay, even if everyone else is gone, so we’re staying. (Our family is fiercely loyal…perhaps to a fault at times? :-/) And while people leave every year, there’s always an influx of new people, as well, so who knows what amazing new friends are on the horizon for us this coming season? I’m praying that God brings the perfect people to our gym to create the exact team that she needs for her to continue to grow, progress, be challenged, and nurture her love of her chosen sport!

More happy & proud (but selfishly sad!) Annelise’s VERY last junior high cheer event was last Thursday: donating stuffed bears to Houston Methodist + Texas Children’s Hospitals ❤️

She’s choosing not to do 8th grade school cheer. (No turning back: tryouts for 8th grade cheer are next week.) Her heart right now is allstar, not school cheer - even with the challenges of this last season & uncertainty of the next - so until it gets more serious in high school, she’s just doing competitive. *I’ll* miss it for now, but it’s not my life!

The good news is, we had a happy delivery to soothe some of our emotions: our Universal Yums box for March is from UKRAINE! This is the *best* snack box we’ve received!!!

There were two flavors of Potato Boom (french fry-shaped potato crisps) - one buttery onion, one veal & adjika (which literally tastes like steak!) Both sooo good. The Roshen milk chocolate bar with creme brûlée filling was the kids’ fave, but it was too sweet for me, (the filling is delish, but the chocolate needed to be dark.) The Golden Chips were these long, flaky rectangular strips of potato chip (formed like Pringles but paper thin!) The thinness is amazing! The Slasti Curd Waffles are wafer cookies with chocolate & a super mild cheese curd (like mascarpone) - the kids thought this one was sooo weird, but I just tasted chocolate wafer cookies. There was another chocolate bar - this one dark! yay!!! - filled with cinnamon caramel; this caramel almost tasted like cinnamon honey. There were two little amazing candies: Minky Binkys are soft, milky caramel chews with fruit filling = love. Roshen Ladybirds are gummies with fruit juice fillings wrapped to look like lucky ladybugs. These candies were both delicious, and I’m not a big candy person. (I’d always usually rather choose a baked good. :-D) Best box, yet!!!