Kansas City Road Trip

This past weekend, Madison and I headed to Kansas City for her first dance competition of the season. We were joined by her friend Tae'lor and her mom Dawn. Here is a run down of our crazy and fun weekend.

Sat: Left for KC in the morning and was about an hour from KC when we found ourselves in the middle of a high speed chase. Pretty cool, but kinda scary at the same time. We enjoyed turning the music up really load, singing along and seat dancing. This was especially fun when cars were passing us; the girls were mortified! We stopped at the Target in Olathe in order to get some new swimsuits. We arrived at our awesome hotel in Overland Park and realized there were lots of sports competitions going on. There were teams of soccer and tennis as well as possibly basketball. All BOY sports. The girls were giggling quite frequently!!!! :) We ate at Applebees and then went to see the movie Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. It was a good one.

We surprised the girls with goodie "Good Luck" boxes full of girlie fun things.

Tae'lor and Madison in the hotel room on Saturday night.

Dawn and I singing with Twizzlers to the girls; there is no end to the amount of things we can do to embarrass them.

Sunday: The girls got up and went swimming and then we headed back up to the room to get ready. We arrived at the convention center at 3pm dressed and ready to go. Then it was time to hurry up and wait. We watched some really interesting dances, some shocking. It is so sad to see the groups that wear adult costumes (lots of skin, sexy, etc.) and the choreography looked liked it should have had a dance pole in the middle of it. Really, really sad.

The girls did their dance and Madison did well. She was about the only one who smiled and generally worked it! Unfortunately due to this particular competition's rules, they weren't eligible for the top ten awards. SOOO, they got a pin and that was it. Here is a breakdown of how this is scored and I will skip the technical stuff.

Each group is placed into a category based on the type of dance that it is (jazz, lyrical, hip hop, ballet) and age group. The judges score each dance against a point system; max is 300 points. The points are divided into categories (roughly 1st through 4th). Each group is given their scores. At the end, they combine all of the groups by age and give their top 10. This is the top 10 group dances based on the scores. So, whoever scored the highest points in the junior division would be #1 and it goes to #10.

Madison's group scored 270 (roughly 3rd place) according to their scores. We aren't sure where they stand overall because they weren't eligible. Overall, I think they did good. Their biggest missed points were their performance faces (not smiling). This can easily be improved upon.

We finally got out of the convention center 6 hours later at 9pm and went straight to the hotel to remove makeup, hair and costumes. We then went straight to IHOP and ate some yummy pancakes, eggs and bacon.

The girls headed to the hot tub after eating and we relaxed before heading back to the room.

Monday: The ride home wasn't very fun. There was snow and ice on the ground and so the first hour was really slow. My washer fluid was also frozen, so I kept having to stop to dump water on my windshield. As soon as we got back to OKC, Madison headed straight to honor choir practice and then to dance practice later that night.

Overall, we enjoyed the weekend. It was a lot of fun to spend time with her, laugh and goof off. I am proud of how she danced and behaved. Love my girl!

This weekend is competition #2, but we only have to go across town!