Ohana Surf Classic Meet

 Tessa had her first gymnastics meet of the season in Watsonville, California. She and I flew out there on Thursday afternoon. We were so excited for a weekend trip!

We found the closest Pizza Hut to the airport and had some dinner before driving to our hotel in the Monterey Bay area. 

Tessa was so excited to see palm trees at the hotel!

Tessa's meet was early Friday morning. Only Lexi, Naomi and Tessa went to this meet.

Arete started on floor and Tessa did awesome on her routine! Her song this season is Bom Bom. It's a cute routine. Her heel hurts with any back tumbling, so her coaches changed both her tumbling passes to front tumbling. She scored 9.35 on floor.

Next was vault, and the plan was that she wasn't going to compete it. But she got my attention when they rotated there and said she was going to do it. She started wearing a plantar fasciitis brace a couple nights before this meet, and it helped enough that she felt like she could do it. She did well, especially for not practicing vault in over a month! She scored 9.1.

Bars were next, and she did so good! She hasn't been doing the required dismount at practice, so she went into this knowing she would have a big deduction for that. The other skills were good though! She has come a long way on bars lately!! She scored 8.45.

They finished on beam. Tessa's been working on overcoming fear of back walkovers again. She did one in warm-up and then told Jana she didn't want to get in her head so she didn't want to do any more. She was trying so hard to stay positive and control her over-thinking. She started out her routine great.

But when it came time for the back walkover, fear got the best of her. It was heartbreaking. She would pose, then step out and try to wipe her sweaty hands on her leotard, pose again, and come out of it again, and eventually she ran out of time. 

When she heard the bell, she quickly ran through the rest of her routine and saluted. I know that was so hard for her. As a mom, it's so hard to watch your kids struggle. Tessa's strong though and I know she'll push through and be able to look back on this somewhere down the road and see how far she came. She scored 8.25.

They only medaled out 5 places for each event at this meet. Tessa finished 1st on bars. It was actually pretty funny to watch her when they called her name. She was shocked 8.45 was 1st place.

She tied for 4th place on floor.

They had everyone go up for the All-Around, and Tessa finished in 5th place with a score of 35.15. 

Tessa took a few minutes to cry and feel the sadness of her beam experience, but a little later on she was able to see some good that happened at the meet too. She went there planning on not qualifying for the All-Around because she wasn't going to be able to compete vault. But she felt good enough to do it, and even with her beam score, she finished 5th in All-Around. That was an unexpected positive. She was also able to see that even though she doesn't have her dismount on bars yet, she's doing better than she thinks on her other bar skills. Sports, like so many things in life, are a journey and we can't always be at the very top of our game when we have new things to learn and unwelcome hardships that come. But life goes on, and we keep working, and we'll be better for the growing pains some day.

We went back to our hotel after the meet and decided to walk over to the beach down the street from our hotel. It was fun to see all the flowers and birds in January!

The weather was great, but the water was still cold!!!

There was an old shipwreck out in the water.

It sure felt good to be at the beach!!

We collected a lot of rocks and shells, and then Tessa started doing hand stands of course. So I took pictures of course. Haha!

It turned into a fun little photo shoot. I love that there are two shadows in so many of the pictures!

Tessa was writing in the sand and then called me over to see it. It was so sweet!!

We stopped in a thrift store on the way back to the hotel. Tessa was fascinated by this rotary phone. She dialed my number just to see how long it used to take to make a call.

We went to the pool when we got back and swam until we were hungry for dinner. The grounds of the hotel were beautiful.

We picked a table right by the koi pond.

Saturday morning we drove into San Francisco. There were quite a few Waymo cars in the city. It was weird to drive next to a car without a driver in it!!

It was very nostalgic for me to drive on the Embarcadero. We would go into San Francisco a lot with my grandparents and cousins when we would visit Antioch each summer. We always walked along Pier 39, so it was fun to show Tessa the Pier!

There was a robot dog outside one store.

The last store down the pier is the Candy Baron. I remember Grandpa Hawkins loved this store because he loved saltwater taffy. I loved that he would let me choose some flavors to put in his bushel basket.

Tessa and I picked lots of flavors we thought the family would like.

You can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the end of the pier.

Tessa was trying to make it look like she was holding Alcatraz. :)

We sat on a bench and looked at all the sights while Tessa ate her pretzel bites. This seagull wanted her pretzel bites so bad. He would not take his eyes off her food. Haha!

I had to get some Boudin sourdough bread of course. I don't make all the fancy shapes out of my bread like this, but I think it tastes pretty similar to the Boudin bread actually!

We wanted to go to Kara's Cupcakes before heading to the airport. The drive there was insane! I have never driven on such steep, inclined streets before. Each block was another hill, with a stop sign at the cross street. There was one stop sign where I literally couldn't see if there were people crossing the cross walk because all I could see was the hood of our car. It was so steep that the hood was almost vertical. When we dropped the car off, I had a tension headache from driving on those hills!

We hadn't seen a single open parking spot the whole way to Kara's, and I was feeling certain that we wouldn't be able to park anywhere and we wouldn't get cupcakes and the whole stressful drive was going to be a waste! As we passed the last stop sign, a car pulled out of it's parking spot right in front of Kara's!!! I couldn't believe it! We pulled into the spot and were able to get our cupcakes. Yay!!

Tessa and I had such a fun weekend together! We love these trips!!