Little Man's First Track Meet (which also turned out to be Kiwi's)

    I am terribly behind on this blog and am beginning to play catch up, but decided to start with the most recent post rather than go back and put everything in order chronologically.
   
     Little Man had his first track meet yesterday.  After being given a choice between baseball and our parks and recreation's track team, he choose track (I did not verbalize my thoughts on this decision, but is it bad that I was secretly thrilled with his choice?   Little kids baseball can be painful to watch).  All of his practices have been held at the high school just minutes away from our house, but the meet was at my old Alma mater.  It was a little weird to watch my baby run on the same track I had spent so many hours on.
      The first practice, Little Man raised his hand high and proudly proclaimed that he was a "miler."  After all, that's what his Uncle Marcus runs.  Four laps, an untied shoelace, a side ache, and one trip later, he was not so sure the mile was his race.   For the meet, he opted instead to try the 800 (twice around the track and a race that Uncle Mike, Mathew, and Marcus ran), the 100, and the long jump.
       Upon arriving at the meet and seeing the schedule we saw they had a open 25 meter dash for 4 and under, so Kiwi had a chance to run in her first race also.

Look at that leap!  On the next jump, he worked on landing with both feet.  He got fourth place for his age group and received a ribbon, so he was excited.  

      Little Man wanted his Uncle Marcus to come to a meet so badly and Uncle Marcus did not disappoint.  Little Man said he needed to cheer as loudly for him as he has cheered for Marcus over the years.  Marcus helped him warm up on the track for the 800 meters and it was pretty sweet to watch them together and possibly had this mama feeling a little sentimental.  Little Man's first sporting event ever was watching Marcus run on this same Parks and Rec team when he was just three weeks old and we had just barely moved back from Utah.  He has spent many hours cheering on his uncles and it was sweet to see the roles reversed.

      I didn't get any good pictures of him running.  I was a little too distracted with how incredibly cute all the little kids were running and encouraging Little Man to not only keep going, but to stop turning around.  He kept craning his little neck all the way around in the 800 to see if anybody was behind him.  I thought he might topple over (not a completely unfounded fear seeing that he has tripped twice in practice...I think his little boy body is growing a little too quickly for him to keep up with it).  There were four people running the 800 and he got second, but first in his age group!  He got eighth out of eight in the 100 meters.  I think distance running is his future.  Unfortunately I don't think either Mike or I had any fast twitch muscle genes to pass on.

 Kiwi with her two friends whose siblings also run track.

 Getting ready to run their race.

 The proud participants with their ribbons.  Kiwi thinks that any ribbon is a first place ribbon.  She kept asking, "Where's my first place ribbon?"  They were so excited last night and both held onto those ribbons like gold (Kiwi even got out of bed and came downstairs to get hers because she had left it on the table).  Maybe they have caught the running bug...or maybe they just really, really like ribbons.