The other good news with all of this is we had the shared fam cottage booked for this week. There are worse places to have to quarantine.
We'll head home tomorrow morning. We get Claire from camp tomorrow afternoon. We'll see how that went.
I didn't write too much about her Whistler trip, but she had a blast. She was so worried she'd be the slowest one there, but the nature of the camp was positive and inclusive, and at least two of the coaches have been vocal about their negative experiences as youth racers with the pressure and outright bullying from other racers and coaches for not being athletic enough or fast enough at times. By the end of the 5 days, she was riding the lifts with the coaches and laughing and joking with them. She has a pretty quick sense of humour and gets along better with adults than kids her age, so here's Claire, spending mornings on Blackcomb glacier, shooting the breeze with almost half the women's national ski team from the past decade as they download the gondola, and they think she's clever. Her skiing improved, but just her overall confidence shot up. Again.
So, from a performance or potential-future-Olympian perspective, should she have been there? No, definitely not. From that metric, it was a colossal waste of money. But at the end of the trip, as she sat in a cafe before the shuttle bus picked us up for Vancouver airport, sipping a cafe mocha that she ordered (and enjoyed) because one coach likes them, and looked so grown up and....happy? Best decision.
An anecdote to show what I mean: Day 4 was very wet. They braved it for a long time, and many athletes came down the mountain early. Claire, aware of the opportunity she was living, stayed as long as the coaches did. That's when she started riding with the coaches, because the other kids were gone. Five coaches, all national team or ex-national team, are on a gondola and wringing out their gloves as water pools on the floor. One coach pulls out a baggy of treats and offers, "Anyone want some dried apricots?" To which Claire responds, "Is anything dry?"
Maybe you had to be there, but in that moment, she made five extremely accomplished women laugh with a simple line and brought light to a wet and miserable day, and gained acceptance on a different level from them. They looked through her sketch book she had with her and asked her to do a sketch in time for the last day of camp. Here it is from day 5:
58 likes, 2 comments - skisisterhood on July 4, 2022: "One of the best parts about camp is learning what makes our camper’s souls sing outside of ski racing. Claire blew us away with her vivid, creative sketches. We asked, with only one day left in camp, if she could come up with a sketch for...
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I should parent in the Olympics.
to the side ... cheeky! PSHAW?
