Proud Moments in Fatherhood

[Ran]

My 8 year old daughter came up with her own song parody. First, let me explain that she is obsessed with zebras. Her room, her clothes etc are all zebra related. Yes, it is annoying, but overall harmless. So naturally, she's not a fan of lions because they eat zebras.

What she did was change the words to Katy Perry's "Roar". She only does the chorus, but that's the only part of the song I can remember. It goes:

Keep your eye out for lions and tigers
Cuz I am a zebra
and you're going to hear me Neigh
Nay-nay-nay-nay Neigh.
Nay-nay-nay-nay Neigh.

I thought it was rather clever.

[Ran]

Ok, so that 8 year old in my last post just graduated high school and will be majoring in photography at UNLV. My other daughter just finished her architecture degree at UNLV and is going to grad school in Denver.

Bad news...I'm paying tuition for both. Good news...Sometime in the next 2 to 4 years, I get a man cave.

[Tom Foolery]

Haha. We all stopped being proud of our children for like a decade.

[vynsane]

Haha. We all stopped being proud of our children for like a decade.

no, just learned what "busy" REALLY means. remember in the past, like in your 20s, where you thought you were SOOOO busy? HAH, we were dumb.

[vynsane]

last week, my daughter's team competed in the world championship event for winterguard (color guard, but indoors and choreographed to prerecorded music instead of a marching band) in Dayton, OH. after a season of consistent first-place wins that began in january, the team performed in three rounds of championship competition against 115 other teams in their class in thursday prelims, then 56 teams in semis on friday afternoon, then the finals on friday night (yes, three performances in just over 24 hours). they had the top score in each round, culminating in a championship run for a crowd of at least 5000 people in the University of Dayton Arena with a score of 97.995, ending the season completely undefeated.

not only are they the best team the school district has ever seen, they're the top achievers of any team their director has ever worked with (in 31 years), and are the first champions from new york state in any class since 2009. the show is entitled "Lizzie" and is inspired by the trial of Lizzie Borden after the brutal axe murders of her step-mother and father of which she was accused, set to the Christina Aguilera song "Hurt". here are two videos of the same championship run - a "multi-cam" view that has a unique perspective and close-ups, and the "static cam" view which allows you to see the over-all choreography and layering a bit better.

i'm so proud i even fixed the youtube embed tag!

multi-cam view (Julia is featured in a close-up towards the beginning):



static-cam



there is also a playlist of all their major competitions from 2022, 2023, and 2024. in 2022, the director only took them to one major regional competition, and was incredibly surprised at how well they did (he didn't think they were going to make finals). last year, he took them to Dayton, and they made it through prelims and semis only to be just edged out for finals - literally 21st out of 20 that advance. to then sweep the entire thing this year, it's been a really incredible trajectory of progress.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... CXCKQJKRRC