New Sport Required

This past Sunday we went to watch DD1's gymnastics display. And by "watch" I of course mean "endure."

In theory, it's a nice idea - getting to see your little darling bounce around while wearing a skin tight shiny leotard. (FYI, I hate those girls on sight. There was not a single moment of my life - even on the day I was born - when I looked decent in a leotard.)

In reality, it's 3 hours of my life which I will never get back.

The idea is to see your kid doing all the various bits of equipment which they've been practising all year. So there are different groups - and each group also has a dance set to music. So at each part, one group does a dance, and then 20 minutes or so go by in which you need to watch ALL THE OTHER groups on various bits of gym equipment. I should also mention that each kid does a routine on each piece of equipment, and most groups have 8-12 kids in them. Then there's a gap of time for piss-farting around, and then another dance by a different group, and then everyone moves around to other bits of equipment, and then it starts all over again ad infinitum.

There's also a big finale dance which all the groups do together, and then a very llloooonnnnggg award presentation. It's basically hell on earth, made even worse by the place it's held - an enormous open floor gymnastics mecca. The only seating is in the gods, on hard wooden bleachers (very wide steps actually). It's hotter than hell up there, your ass is killing you, and the only food on offer is whatever is in the vending machine. The families who have been there before come along to the event looking like they are either going camping or going to watch the Test cricket. They're shlepping eskies filled with food and drinks, blankets and pillows and squishy seat thingies, and games and books for the younger kids. I only WISH I was kidding about this. The newbies who have not experienced this yet come with...nothing. The rest of us watch them in silence as they spend the first half hour in rapture, the second half hour in hunger, the third half hour in ass pain, the fourth half hour sweating uncontrollably, and then fifth and ongoing half hours running back and forth to the vending machine, hoping against hope it will have suddenly filled with hot chips and Big Macs.

Trust me, by next year they will either have decided that gymnastics is a sport for masochists, or they'll BYO eskie and squishy seat thingie.

My problem, as we all know, is that (as previously mentioned here), the first law of motherhood is "Thou Shalt Suffer" and so this is now the fourth year I've endured this special kind of parental torture. My MIL, god bless her, bowed out early this year with a mystery sudden-onset illness...but sadly, I couldn't in all honesty make ALL FOUR OF US come down with the same thing so we had to suffer it all from beginning to end. DD1 has announced to all of us that she's going to do it next year, too...because she desperately wants the little gold trophy they get after 5 years attendance. The next one after that is a 10 year trophy, and frankly, if I have to go through ANOTHER 5 years of this crap, I'm going to make DD1 buy ME a trophy for surviving it all.

Motherhood. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass.