January of Hadley

I'm not sure why, but I didn't take any photos of Owen in January, so this is a month look back for Hadley! Ha! First and foremost, Hadley's school art was chosen (1 of 2 representing 5th grade) by her elementary art teacher to be on display at the KISD Rodeo Art Show. Even better, she got a blue ribbon there and was selected to compete at the actual KISD Rodeo! That's coming up in February, so her art is still traveling to do that. It's a stained glass-effect watercolor of a barn with longhorns in the foreground. Beautiful!

We did a traditional celebration of ice skating in honor of MLK day. She had asked if we could go again, since she remembered going a couple of years ago. Surprisingly, Owen wasn't interested, so we made it a girls' trip and did a little shoe shopping around the mall afterwards. We didn't find anything worth taking home.

We followed that up with homemade banana pudding, including toasted meringue on top. It had a little bit of a salty-sweet thing going on. Yum!

A ha! Here's proof that Owen was also around. We celebrated Chinese New Year with the cousins and ate our weight in dumplings. The kids decided to make a comic strip of Ninja Carrot and his sidekick, Mr. Broccoli. They were under attack by the Smarty army (candy). Will they prevail or will they get cavities? Stay tuned!

Hadley has been working on her 5th grade Challenge Project, which is kind of like a Capstone project to end her time in elementary GT. She has chosen to research the history of architecture (her current future profession of choice!) and will have a poster-board to present in May. As part of that, she's supposed to have a 3-D model, which works perfectly for buildings, so we got an off-brand Lego set for Big Ben. 3600, tiny pieces and about a week later, and voila! Big Ben!

We finished up the month with another gymnastics meet. This was a big one in downtown Houston at the George R Brown convention center. We had to wake up well before dawn on a rainy morning and drive on the rainy highway, park in a garage, and find the right gym space to check in. 

It was the Simone Biles Invitational! After stretching and warm-ups, THE Simone Biles came out to give a quick wish of good luck and welcome. And when she did, she was just a few feet away from H, and she said "HI!"!! Unfortunately, I was too far away, and Simone was too short, to get a good picture of the close encounter. But check out the tight and secure bun I did pre-coffee, thanks to Aunt Loni's demonstration!

Hadley's goal for this meet was to achieve all 9s, and she was just 0.05 off from achieving that! The floor judges were particularly tough at this meet, so the 8.95 was actually one of the better scores: 9.3 bars, 9.35 beam, 8.95 floor, and 9.225 vault. So close! Guess that leaves room for improvement in the last two meets of the season. (H is in dark pants in the middle.)