a weekend at home

It was lovely to have another weekend at home with my family. On Saturday morning, I began making a new leotard for Rainbow Girl. It must seem to regular readers that I am always making new leotards for her. Well, yes, it does happen quite regularly! Because she trains 4 days a week, and keeps growing and the seasons change, she needs preferably 4 leotards.

We arrived in this new summer season and realised that she only had two summer leotards that still fitted her and she’ll grow out of them soon. So I made one a few weeks ago, and another one on Saturday morning. She was thrilled to be able to wear a hot-off-the-sewing-machine leotard (finished about 5 minutes before she left!) for Saturday’s training.

On Sunday morning I was a good community citizen, and went down to help out with the pit clean out at the gym. What is a pit, and why did it need to be cleaned? A pit is a deep area of the gym, filled with foam blocks that gymnasts usually vault into, and sometimes do bar routines over. It means that they can do the routine without needing to worry about their landing.

The pit gets to be quite a disgusting place though. Over time, the foam breaks down and turns to rubber dust. Surely it also must just fill up with dirt and other detritus? Most of us parents, it makes our skin crawl. Who knows what is in there? So for some time, a pit clean out had been planned, and all of us didn’t really want to participate, but we knew we should. Of the two parents in this family, I am the one without respiratory issues, so it was up to me to help.

The clean out started on Saturday night at about 5pm and went through to about 9pm. They had up to 30 people helping at one stage. So when I arrived at 7am on Sunday morning to help, this is what the gym looked like:
And still there was more foam still in the pit! In the photo, the pit stretches most of the way across the far wall. It is about 3-4 metres wide and about 2-3 metres deep. And the whole thing had been filled with foam blocks.

By the time I left about an hour and a half later, the pit was nearly empty. Then they were going to have to use an industrial vacuum to gather up the foam residue and gunk still left in the pit, and start putting the blocks back in again. The most degraded blocks were going to go in the bottom, and the better ones on top. Then the rest of the gym was going to have to be vacuumed.

The bottom of the pit has large flat layers of foam covering it, and between them there are small gaps. It was easy to accidentally sink down between them and get stuck. I had to extract my leg from a hole in the foam at one stage, and it required a good hard pull to get it out. I’m glad my shoes were tied on well!

They found all sorts of things in the pit, and I can well imagine how quickly and easily things sink out of reach. On the Saturday night they found a wallet. They were still looking for the mobile (cell) phone that went missing not so long ago. I found a hairbrush, a ventolin asthma puffer, 4 small plastic koalas (I can imagine some kid at a birthday party going home very upset, having lost them), 25 cents, and best of all, a set of rosary beads! Of course, there were the obligatory hair elastics and dead socks.

I’m looking forward to seeing it this afternoon; all the foam blocks back in place again, and all the gym equipment reinstated in the absence of piles of foam blocks! It will have had to have been finished by the end of yesterday, because gym classes are back in there today, probably with the older elite gymnasts training there first thing this morning. I hope they got it done in time!