Our little champ!

Some of you may remember our oldest daughter Maggie as being just a baby at the Baltimore Reunion. Well she's now 9 and in 4th grade. She attends Immanuel Lutheran School in Palatine, outside of Chicago. One of the things she really enjoys is running on the school's Cross Country team. This past weekend, her team competed in the Illinois Lutheran Schools Cross Country Championships, and her team took first place! In fact, both the boys and girls teams took first, the first time one school has won both in the same year. The girls bumped off the 5 time defending champion. Although her time didn't figure in the scoring,(she's running against 6th,7th and 8th graders) she had a blast and loved being part of the winning team. This weekend, they are in Mequon Wisconsin for Nationals.
Here's the action shot.

Here she is holding the trophy proudly displaying her medal.


And a picture of both the winning teams..

We're sure proud of our little "champ"

Congratulations, that's great, Mike.. I bet a lot of dedication and hard work went into that championship..

Congratulations Maggie

Congratulations to the proud parent too !!!

Great team work for the Immanuel Lutheran School.
And WAY TO GO MAGGIE!

Congratulations, Maggie. And, good luck at nationals! I'm sure mom & dad are extremely proud of your accomplishments. I'm sure you will be a contributor to additional state championships for the team.

Congrats to Maggie!

Great activity to have your child involved in. Sports always lead to the type of friends you want your child involved with, and reasonable goals to achieve.

Congratulations to Maggie and her team! For a 4th grader to have to run against those older kids I'm sure she did very well.

In X-country you don't have to score to help your team. You can prevent the other team from scoring by finishing ahead of some of their runners. It's a neat sport really. I did my share of cheering for my kids and their teamates all through their high school years.

Maggie is lucky to be able to run at such an early age. Our school system was very large but only had X-Country for grades 9-12.

My daughter usually brought up the rear but she always finished. My son never got past JV but almost won a race. He had a big lead going into the woods but not coming out. Having never been in the lead he missed a turn! Mom was very disapointed.

Well, they did it. Despite light to pouring rain, and a stiff, cool wind off Lake Michigan, both of our Bobcat Cross Country teams took first place in the National Lutheran School Cross Country Championships this past weekend in Wisconsin.
http://triblocal.com/palatine/community/...onal-cc-titles/
What a great couple of weekends. During the girls race, the light drizzle turned into a heavy downpour for about 5 minutes. Despite it all, all of the runners finshed. Maggie had a great time, said she really liked running in the rain!.
Sue, Maggie is usually near the back, if not at the back as well. Her times improve each week and that is all that matters at this point. She's finally understanding the "team" concept. They had a big celebration at school this afternoon. She was loving it. And it's funny to see how she treats her new "hardware", with kid gloves, which is very unlike her.

That's awesome, Mike! My Mary is Maggie's age. Our public school here in Michigan also doesn't offer XCountry until high school. She was asking me today about going to a private Christian school - which we do have locally, but the tuition isn't an option for choice at this point. Congrats to her team and to her!