Five Months with No Competitions or Shows

We are skipping the Halloween show this year (well if there is one) and our seating area is being torn out (replaced by balcony seats which will be really, really awesome) so there will be no Christmas show this year. And the competition season won't start back in full force until February so that means 5 whole months with no programs to memorize. The settling down from the last competition has already caused my child to skate better. She's learning footwork. Really getting it - not stumbling through it. Its clicking and looking good when she does it. Landing her loop again - uh - knock on wood. How much can a kid learn in 5 months??? Yeah - well just this summer I learned how much a kid can forget how to do in just a few months. My daughter's been figure skating four and a half years. She's learned a lot. So have I. I've been skating myself for 3 whole years now. And what I can do and what I know how to do are light-years from each other. I know the difference between a loop and a salchow (and the difference between a flip and lutz for that matter). Yep I do. I can watch my kid do a salchow and say that was a salchow not a loop you are on the wrong foot. She can't feel she is on the wrong foot. It feels right. I put markers on her toes so she can tell a salchow from a loop. So she knows which foot to jump off of for her toe loop even. Toe loop - been doing toe loops for 2 and a half years. It was the first jump she learned. Yep before she could do a waltz jump my baby could do a single toe loop. It was what she did naturally when she went to jump off the ice. And two years later I still have to tell her occasionally she needs to launch off her right foot and pick off her left toe. I learned this when we thought she broke her left big toe at Tae Kwon Do and it turned black and blue and swelled up real big. The toe loop was the only move in her program that required 'pressure' on her left toe. It wasn't broke and the swelling went down before the show. I'm sure her doctor thought we were all evil for not making her miss her solo. It was important to her. And had the swelling not gone down or gotten worse we probably would've had her skip the show. Doctor's don't grasp how much work kids put into these things. Maybe most people don't get the work that goes into it. I know a lot - can't do most of what I know. My daughter can do a lot but has a hard time grasping what it is exactly that she is doing when she does it. She's accidentally landing her loop again. It may be a while before she's landing on purpose. Five months to get all her singles straight in her head so she is landing purposefully and with confidence? Yep - I think that will happen. And I think she'll have a really great back sitspin (better than her current back scratch). And maybe she'll have a flying camel by then. She thinks it flies now but it doesn't. Five months for me muster up enough love for this sport to give her another season of shining boots and stoning dresses and spraying glitter in her hair. Yeah it definitely could happen.