My Favorite Things EVER!

Oh hey there

My blog is BLUE.

I can't be tamed

1. COLORFUL pens
Yes indeed I have an unhealthy addiction to colorful pens. I think I have like 50% OCD and I know every white girl ever says they have OCD but I legit think I do...but just a little. I don't get like creepy death images in my head or do things like walking through a door over and over until I get it right...I just like things to be organized. But I'm getting off topic. Basically I have 3 planners...School, Life, and Other. I really like my planners to be neat and color coordinated...hence the colorful pens. I don't know why but I ❤︎ LOVE ❤︎ when everything is super colorful. I write my notes, my homework and everything else in colorful pens...it just makes life so much more exciting! Just ask Kylie...

K: "Maggie what do you want for your birthday?"
M: "Pens"
K: "Pens?"
M: "Pens."
Also, Kylie will tell you about how I don't let ANYBODY touch my pens because they will ruin them! *cough* Kylie I still hate you for squishing the tip in on my blue pen in St. George *cough*

My favorite pens

2. Lip Balm
Oh dear goodness gracious...I am obsessed with lip balm. I couldn't tell you how many lip balms I have because it would take probably a week to find/count all of them. The weird thing is...my lips get chapped really easily which is really mind-boggling considering the fact that I re-apply my lip balm every 5 minutes. I buy Baby Lips, ChapStick, EOS, Burts Bees, Wet n Wild, Carmex, Nivea and any other kind of lip balm you can imagine. I LOVE LIP BALM.

I found this on the internet and it sums up my feelings.

3. Fuzzy Socks

I LOVE FUZZY SOCKS!!!!

yas

4. Mike N Ikes
Hi my name is maggie and i'm a mike-n-ike-aholic. The first step is admitting you have a problem amiright? I cannot put into words my insane obsession with the fruity, delicious, chewy candies that are mike n ikes.
If you have never tried mike n ikes...
Step 1: Get out of my life
Step 2: Never speak to me again
Step 3: Go getcho self some mike n ikes because that shit is delicious

For all you peasants who don't know what mike n ikes are.

Well that's all for this post friends. I hope you...

HOLY MACRAL MY FAVORITE SONG JUST CAME ON PANDORA AND I JUST THOUGHT I SHOULD TELL YOU THAT IT IS MY JAAAAAMMM!!

k bye

Whats Happnin?

Hey there friends
I just wanted to give you some quick updates on things that are going on for me right now. (does anybody actually care?)

1. State
In about 48 hours I will be on my way (a 5 hour drive) to Saint George for one of the most important meets of the year...STATE MEET! If I do well at state meet (get a certain all around score) then that means I qualify to go to regionals...which just so happens to be in LONG BEACH! Hell Heck Yes!!! (Are you happy Kalli?). Anywho I am suuuupper excited to go to the warm weather and poolside lemonades in saint george but I am also super nervous! I may or may not write a blog post about it but idk bro.

2. New Schedule/Training
If you don't know this (I don't know why you would) but I am no longer doing the same training schedule and I am not training with Tina anymore. Xcel Gold (Maggie, Kylie, Tasia and Brenna) are training with the level 6 girls now which is AWESOME!! The coaches are much better and I love getting to train more hours per week! The only thing that kinda sucks is that we don't get to train with Emery...single tear

3. Bye Tasia
Tasia has told us the extremely sad news that she isn't going to compete next year. She is going to finish out this competition season and then quit. She does have a good reason though. She is a pro ski racer and skiing and gymnastics just don't mesh very well. It sucks but it's better for her because she had a crazy insane athletic schedule. When she wasn't skiing she was at gym and when she wasn't at gym she was at school. She also gets a lot of injuries which sucks because injuries suck.

Well I guess that's all I have to say in this post. I really have no idea what to post so you guys should leave comments telling me what you want me to post about. Hey guess what...this is my last post of this quarter! Wow that went by really fast! If you didn't know already, we are required to have a link and a picture in all of our blog posts. I don't really know what to put a picture of so I'll just give you a picture of the hotel I'm staying at in St. George...

The hotel i'm staying at in St. George...can you tell
why I'm excited?!?! Creds

Here's a link to a random website -----> Click for a surprise

Ke$ha Later,
Maggie

How a Gymnastics Competition Works

Hello Friends,

So as I have previously mentioned, I am going to be blogging about all of my competitions or "meets" this year, so I thought you might want some background info.  A gymnastics competition is referred to as a "meet". Don't ask me why, it just is.  So in my level, we have around 5-6 meets per competition season, plus state meet, and if we qualify, regionals.  Normally, all of our meets are in Utah except for regionals.  Regionals is out of state, last year it was in Arizona, and this year it will be in California!

Every year, around the end of October, we receive a "meet schedule".  It pretty much tells us what meets we are going to that competition season and when.  My meet schedule for this season looks like this...

My competition schedule.

Competition season for gymnastics is usually from December-May.

So now into how a meet works.
There are two parts to a gymnastics meet.  Individual awards and Team awards.  Individual awards are First, Second, Third place for one gymnast.  The top three scores from one team are averaged and entered into team awards.  Team awards are First, Second, Third place for the entire team.  So there's a basic explanation of how awards works.  Now onto some technical stuff…

In gymnastics there are four events, beam, bars, floor and vault. Each gymnast competes every event and receives a score from the judges out of 10.  A gymnasts score starts from 10 and for every mistake they make in their routine, the get deductions.  (I know, super positive right?) On every event there are two judges, they each give the athlete a score out of 10, and then their two scores are averaged to make your final score.  You get one try for your routine on every event, except for vault.  For vault, you get to do two vaults, whichever vault scores higher is the one that stays.  There are five sections for individual awards; bars, beam, floor, vault and all-around.  All around is where you average all of your scores for all four events.  To win first place on all-around is a HUGE deal!

I do a gymnastics program called Xcel.  There are five levels in Xcel; bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond.  This competition season,  here's what my team looks like...

Tasia: Silver 
Brenna: silver
Emery: silver
Kylie: gold
Maggie: gold

Since my whole team is silver and gold, we will most likely be going to meets at around the same times.  The only exception will be when Kylie go to meets where Silver and gold do not compete at the same time.  Unfortunately for me and Kylie, this year, Cody has decided that she no longer wants to do gymnastics, it is very sad because Cody is like my sister,  I don't want to talk too much about it in this post, but basically we don't have a gold team this year.  The reason for this is, in order to have a team, you must have at least three gymnasts competing in the same level.  Me and Kylie will not be competing for team awards this year. ☹

So there you have it, a basic rundown of how these competitions will work.  Sorry if this post was kind of boring, but I thought you might need to know some of this stuff for my future posts about competitions.

Me and Cody last year after winning first place
in team awards. (single tear)

Ta Ta,
Maggie

6 Things Normal People Don't Understand About Gymnasts.

1. We spit on our grips.
So grips are those things that gymnasts wear on there hands during bars.

Photo Creds: inthecompanyofstrangers

<------those things

So in order to keep the chalk on our grips, we use water...or spit. So anyway, people think that it's weird that we spit on our grips.  I don't know why... I mean, we also use water on them and spit is stickier sooo...

2. We are OBSESSED with leotards

Nobody knows why, but at least in my team, we are OBSESSED with leos.  They are just so fun and colorful and YAHS! Whenever somebody on our team gets a new leo we all get super excited and it's like they're getting married or something.  Everybody crowds around them and tells them how cute they look in in and ask where they got it from.  So yeah...we love leos.

I'm getting better at the whole "drawing" thing

My Leo Collection. I have like...a lot

3.  The bond in our team

So our team has a family-like bond.  Now I only see my team at practice 2-3 times a week...not as much as the elite gymnasts...but still.  We basically see each other every weekend and practice 2 and a half hours together every day.  We laugh with each other.  Cry in front of each other.  Practically know everything about each other. Nobody but the people in the team can understand but basically my team is my second family.

4. DON'T BREAK THE CHALK BLOCKS!!!!

So on bars, we use chalk on our grips to help our grips grip to the bar better so that we don't fall off when we are up on the high bar.  The thing is, it's way easier to load your grips up with chalk when using a block because you can pretty much just rub it over your grips and BOOM...all chalked up.  It is much harder, however, to chalk up your grips with loose chalk because you have to rub it into your grips and it just takes longer.  Anywho, it really sucks when people crush up the chalk blocks because, then theres no more blocks left.  So if we catch somebody crushing up the chalk blocks...we get mad.

This is a chalk block.
(how cool are my zebra grips?!?)

5.  The floor is NOT a trampoline
If you were to actually jump on the floor, you would be surprised as to how un-bouncy it was. The reason everybody thinks that the floor is so bouncy is because when olympic gymnasts do floor the go super high because well...they're olympians.

6. We are super exited to learn our routines!
So one thing you should know is that over the summer we don't have routines, we pretty much just learn new skills and such, so it's really exciting to be able to learn a brand-new routine made specially for you right before the start of competition season.  It's fun to discover what skills you will be competing that season and it is especially exciting to hear your new floor music for the first time ever.  It's just super fun in general to learn new routines!

So yeah, those are some of the things that normal people don't understand about gymnasts/gymnastics. If you want, leave a comment telling me what I should post about next. Vote on my poll!! Ok that's all bye.
-Maggie

Beam, Bars, Floor, Vault

The events...pretty much what makes up Gymnastics.  I'm just gonna give you a brief description of all of the events because...yolo.

Here's a picture I drew you of the events.

Vault.   Here's how it goes down.  You run as fast as you can, jump on a springy thing, put your hands on a big table thing,  do a couple of flips, and land (hopefully). Here is a gif to help your brain.

Courtesy of: The Wire

Beam.  *shiver goes down my spine*.  So if you are good at doing backflips, on a four inch piece of wood, four feet off the ground, then beam is for you!! Unfortunately, I am not good at doing backflips, on a four inch piece of wood, four feet off the ground. And mostly it's because i'm afraid of this...

Courtesy of: Gif Shot

Here is a picture of me falling off the beam...

#acurate

So to sum it up...I HATE BEAM!!

Bars.  Bars is a pretty fun event.  I personally think that it is the most difficult event because it requires a HUGE amount of strength.  One of the first skills you learn on bars is the Kip. A kip is that swingy thing that all gymnasts do when the start their bar routines...i'll just show you.

Courtesy of: Wikia

Anyway, it is like, a HUGE deal when a gymnast gets their first kip. It personally only took me about a month to get my Kip, but it was still like the coolest thing ever when I could finally do it. So enough about kips, bars is a cool event.

Floor.  Floor is pretty chill, everybody likes floor.  I think that it is the least nerve racking event, but the most dangerous event, because of the extreme tumbling combinations.  Floor is mostly jumping around and doing flips on a floor that is a little more bouncy than normal.  Floor is my strongest event because I have tons of power and I'm not afraid to try new tumbling skills.

Here is what floor looks like...

Soooooo...yeah! That's a basic rundown of all of the events in gymnastics!

Bye,

Maggie

My Teammates

Oh dear God where do I start? Well i’m just going to wing it and give you a brief explanation of all of my teammates.  We all do gymnastics at Black Diamond Gymnastics. My teammates are: Cody, Tasia, Kylie, Emery, Sophie, and Brenna. 

Cody. I've been teammates with Cody for the longest out of everybody. Cody is in eighth grade and is 12 (just a little bit younger than me, so we are always competing in the same age division (against each other)).  She has been doing gymnastics for two years longer than me,  and she's really good!  She's really funny… not in a joking kind of way… in a dry sense of humor kind of way… like instead of encouraging us when we are having an off day, she will say things like, “MAGGIE, YOU SUCK!!” Which makes us laugh even when she's not trying to be funny. Me and Cody are pretty much like twins, we always try to wear our hair   the same way at practice and we try to coordinate leotard colors for practice.

Me and Cody after a competition last year.

Tasia… Tasia, Tasia, Tasia… where do I begin?  So Tasia  is pretty much a tree… she's really tall and really skinny!  Her nickname is ”LT” which stands for  “Little tree”. She has the weirdest sense of humor and there is literally never a time at practice when she isn't making me laugh! We also like to call her “Fish” because sometimes when she's on bars she flops around like a fish.  Tasia is one of the newest members on our team… she's only been here for like a year… but it feels like I've known her my whole life.  She is just so fun to be around in general. (also her mom is a nail artist and she always does my nails! YAY!)

I couldn't find a picture of me and Tasia, 

so I drew one...you're welcome.

Kylie.  Kylie is in seventh grade, but we look like we're pretty much the same age.  Kylie used to be a level 7 gymnast, but then she quit because she broke her ankle.  Now she is back at the gym again, but she lost a lot of her skills.  Because she used to be in such a high level, she is really, really, really, good!!  Also, me,   Cody, and Kylie are all the same leotard size so we all share leotards with each other!

Me and Kylie

Emery and Sophie are both in the same grade. They're both really short and I both really funny! Sophie especially has a really weird sense of humor, like one day we were doing push-ups and all of a sudden she goes, “I NEED A BAGEL!” So now we always bring her bagels at practice and competitions.  Emery is a total goofball and is always finding some way to make us  all laugh.

Me and Emery

(I couldn't find a picture of me and Sophie)

Brenna. I have been doing gymnastics with Brenna for as long as I have with Cody. She's the same age as Tasia, and really likes trying new skills that she has no idea how to do… and sometimes she lands them!  Fun fact, Brenna is like… really good at Ariels!

So yeah that's pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed this post about my teammates, my crazy friends, my family. Okay byeeeee!