All-Star Cheer Season #3, BETA Club, and Band Concerts, Oh My!

Well, we're off and running on another all-star cheer season! It's hard to believe this is her 3rd year. She has really come far in every aspect of cheer - tumbling, flying, general stage presence. We saw the stage presence thing last week at a BETA Club performance at the school. Her BETA club was getting ready for the regional convention, where the kids compete in different competitions. Her group performed the different selections at a spaghetti dinner. Right before she went on, she was bitten/stung by some insect outside. She was in pain and it was itching, as she's allergic to bug bites, but we NEVER would have known from her performance! She was cute, smiled, danced, etc as if nothing was wrong. I guess she got that from cheer. My little trooper. Who would have known that the toddler that would scream as if she was on fire when she skinned her knee would ever pull off something like that!?

Her first cheer competition is this Saturday in Lakeland. They have 4 teams in their division. She's very excited. The routine looks good, the girls are excited. I'll post pictures and let you know how it goes!

As for BETA, she competed in Group Talent (where a TON of the kids danced, sang, tumbled, etc. to different songs), Songfest (they took the song Respect and changed the words to be a BETA theme) and Living LIterature (they staged a scene from Hansel and Gretel and had to hold the pose frozen until the judges were done with them - about 6 minutes). Some of the other kids participated in other various competitions such as Brain Bowl, Spelling, Math, Crafts, etc. They took 3rd in Group Talent, 4th in Living Literature (did I mention that Carissa was Gretel? She was sooo cute!), and (drum roll, please) FIRST in Songfest! This qualifies them to compete at Nationals in Myrtle Beach over the summer! Everyone is excited. You can click on the picture below to make it bigger.



As for band, they have their winter concert on Thursday. Carissa will be performing with both jazz band and wind ensemble. The bad news from band this week is that the band director will be leaving any day for the remainder of the year. It's good news for the band director, as she and her husband are adopting a baby, but really bad news for us. This is Carissa's 3rd band director since she's been in middle school! That's a new director each year!