Marlie Lou Retton

That title is just hilarious given the circumstances. Marlie had her first gymnastics class today. Mom has been waiting for this moment for a LONG time and we were all SO excited. Marlie could sense the excitement as we got her dressed and she was smiling like crazy for the camera!

She thinks she's super cool here.........

This one we're smiling because Momma actually put a pony tail in Marlie's hair!

I LOVE the look on her face in this one. This is priceless! Neither of us have any idea of what we're in for here. Just wait.....

And she even gave me a kiss. The stingy kisser in the family gave me a kiss! WOHOO! Must be my lucky day.
Well maybe not.......as soon as we got to the gym Marlie spotted all the little girls practicing and wanted to go into the big girls section. She wanted NOTHING to do with the cute little toddler area they had set up. She started screaming......... I finally got her to go on the slide and that calmed her down until she literally bottomed out at the bottom and tears started again.

Our friends Heather and Avery came too and I hope I at least said hello here. The rest of the 5 hours...okay it was 45 minutes but seemed like 5 hours... I was trying to keep Marlie from screaming everyone out of that gym.

Every time I asked Marlie if she wanted to do a somersault she started crying like I was asking her to walk through fire, barefoot, on broken glass, blindfolded! She eventually calmed down and she attempted the little rock wall. Of course the teacher was so excited that Marlie had tried something so she ran over to help and the screaming returned! She calmed down at another point until she spotted Daddy in the balcony and started crying again!!!

Oh well, I guess we'll have to try again. Hopefully I have a better update next time. We'll try for a few more weeks and if this continues we'll have to be drop outs. Maybe try again when she's a little older. One step at a time..........