My baaaaaaaaaby isn’t a baby anymore. He’s not even a toddler. He’s *almost* a preschooler.

Now if only I could get him to potty train. (It’s fine. He won’t go to elementary school in diapers, we’ll figure it out. I just hate the part where I can’t ever sit down because I have to walk him to the bathroom 400 times a day.)

Finnegan is a real sweetheart most of the time. He loves people after he pretends to be shy for a few minutes. He’s super brave and a bit of a daredevil, so he hurts himself regularly but it never slows him down. He has a great vocabulary but still a baby voice, so sometimes he’s hard to understand. He’s very smart and has a looooong memory. He can be a real jerk when you’re mad at him, because he’ll just laugh in your face and DGAF about your consequences.

Don’t ask when he’s getting a haircut because he’s not.

Apologies for the wind blowing background noise on the video, we did it at the lake and I didn’t block the microphone well enough.

I decided not to backdate this to June, but that’s when the last day was. I’ll have a post literally next week with the 2019 first day of school pictures.

And here’s 2018 Last Day of School post

And here’s the 2018 First Day of School post

Do you know what I never did? The end-of-the-school-year posts from June.

I took the pictures. I made the graphics. There’s no good reason I didn’t just get it up here on the blog.

I also have pictures from our vacation to Virginia, Linc & Finnegan’s very Pinnable birthday party, updates about our house and our dogs and the kids. I didn’t make Lincoln a birthday video post or recap my trip to Disney World with Caroline for The Summit cheer competition. Oops.

This blog turned 11 in July. It was 11 years ago that I first found out I was pregnant with Evan and decided blogging would be a good way to connect with other moms. It worked VERY well. Some of my best friends began as internet friends but now I would consider them more real than most people. I find it much easier to address a vague and unspecific audience when I talk about things I struggle with than talking to people face-to-face. I don’t want to give up this space, even if I don’t have any readers or sponsored posts or cool invites any more thanks to my absence.

In fact, this blog is the baby book for all four of my kids, with their birth stories and monthday updates and birthdays and adventures. It’s important to me that I keep it up, at least casually, while I still have little kids. The two oldest absolutely love looking back on things I’ve written about them (which is a relief) and I don’t want Linc and Finn to wonder where their toddler and preschool years went.

So if you’re interested in content like “Last Minute Disney Trip Tips” or “What To Do When Your Baby Keeps Shouting ‘You not my best fwend anymore!'” or puppy dog birthday party ideas, you’re in luck. I’m back.

I don’t think I’ve talked about cheerleading in the past, but considering HOW MUCH of my life is currently devoted to Caroline’s chosen sport, it’s about time I start. At least a little.

This is not going to turn into a cheer blog. I don’t know nearly enough to even TRY to become a cheer blog, even if that was my goal. I am literally just stumbling around, spraying her with hairspray and driving her to competitions and trying to remember to pack her skirt when we go out of town.

I was never a cheerleader. I barely even knew any cheerleaders. Everything I know about it comes from my many, many viewings of Bring It On (which, honestly, isn’t a bad place to start) and listening to other parents talk at the gym. I’ve learned A LOT over the past season but I’m going to feel like a newbie for at least a couple more years.

Here’s what I do know so far: Caroline is on a Youth Small Level 1 team called Stardust. Youth teams are made up of kids between the ages of 5 and 11. Small means they have less than 22 kids on the team. Level 1 means they can do tumbling that includes front and back walkovers but not handsprings. Her team is from a gym called East Celebrity Elite – Oakdale. There are a bunch of East Celebrity Elite gyms in New England, and it’s a pretty big and highly-regarded program. I had no idea about any of that when I took Caroline to one single tumbling class to see if she liked it.

Youth teams are eligible for this really big huge important cheer competition held in Florida every May called The Summit. Our gym accepts Summit bids (bids are invitations) if you get one, so when we started the year we knew there was a chance Caroline’s team would have to travel to Florida for the competition. But Stardust had a very rocky start to their season. Caroline and a few of her friends had come from a tiny prep team, where just doing a somersault was considered a success. Stardust was brand new, it didn’t exist last year, so the rest of the kids came from other teams, other gyms, or were brand new. They came in dead last at their first competition.

Then something amazing happened. Those fourteen girls and one boy decided they didn’t like being last. They knew they could do better. The coaches knew they could do better. They put in ALL the work. As parents, we downloaded the music and played it on repeat so the kids could practice at home. We all started shouting “ONE, THREE, FIVE, SEVEN” as loud as possible to keep the counts during performances so the kids didn’t lose their place.

And they got better! SO MUCH BETTER. At a competition in Boston, they won. Then they won AGAIN. And then the unbelievable happened and they received a bid to The Summit.

According to the internet, only 7% of teams that are eligible to go to The Summit get invited. And it’s an at-large bid, not even a wild card, which means we perform on Saturday in the regular comp and not Friday in the first round. It’s a bid deal, is what I’m saying. And a truly huge, amazing, incredible deal for a little team that started at the bottom.

The logistics of The Summit sent me into a panic spiral for a few days (there was a lot of crying) but as of right now it looks like we’ve figured it out and we’re on our way. It’s just Caroline and I headed to Florida, although we’re sharing flights, rides, a house and basically all our time with MANY other cheer families. (Apologies in advance for anyone on that JetBlue flight on May 1st.)

The bonus part of the trip is a few days at Disney World, which is why I’ve come around to being excited. By Sunday night all the cheer stuff will be over and we’ll get some amazing mommy-daughter time.

I think if we made a list of Reasons Caroline Loves Cheer, “spending time with mommy alone” would be really near the top. She likes the physical aspects and LOVES setting goals for herself. She also loves bows and sparkles and getting to wear makeup (although she hates the fake ponytail they wear for comp). The top thing might be the teamwork though – nothing builds trust and friendships closer than this kind of work.

We have a special Disney swag bag reveal for the team tonight, send-off performances tomorrow, and two more practices before we leave. When we get back, the rest of May is an intense schedule of classes getting Caroline ready for tryouts. And by the first week of June she’ll either be on a new team all together or meeting her new Stardust teammates, starting her second full-year season of cheer.