Princess Is Out. . .. To An Extent

The 12 and under boxing class is officially full.  And who shows up with a registration form that I had given her nearly three weeks ago?  Princess, of course.  A short time later, her mother walked into the gym.  "Princess will probably have to wait until the Spring session to be registered in the class again," I informed her.

A man who works with a community organization had came in earlier and registered several kids for the class, closing up the registration.  So Princess lost out.  I know that won't prevent her from showing up in the gym anyway.  She went into her usual habit of being an distraction.  The difference is now, I can ask her to leave, keep her out, and (hopefully) make it stick.  Princess seems to forget that her reputation precedes her; I'm not the only staff person who has had to deal with her antics.

If I can only get Angel and Marine to come to their usual class time, that would be sweet.  A couple more teens signed up, which would give both of them new sparring partners to work with.  The man who mentors the new teens at the community organization promised to send them to me ASAP.

The next challenge (and there always seems to be one, doesn't there?) is getting the kids to stop pestering me while I'm monitoring sparring and working one-on-one with other kids on the punch mitts.  Tough, Talky, and T1 have a habit of walking into the ring and standing around while I'm working with someone.  They pepper me with questions and comments.  I was holding punch mitts for Angel at the time.  T1 and his sisters' mouths kept running.  Finally, I said, "I can't do this and talk to you at the same time."  T1 seemed to be put out by what I said, but I didn't care.  Because both Angel and I were being distracted -- they were trying to carry on a conversation with her, too -- there was the possibility of either Angel or I getting hurt.

T1 and his sisters are also easily distracted by Princess when she's in the gym.  They play with her instead of training, then complain when her teasing goes too far.  T1, Tough, and Talky are not innocent when it comes to that scenario.  But when Princess is not around, they tend to pay more attention to me.  I keep noticing that T1 appears to be more serious about the sport than his sisters.  He was asking me a lot of questions about the upcoming tournaments.  T1 really wants to participate in those, and I want to help him get there.  But T1 has to focus.  Unfortunately, Princess being in the gym hasn't helped much.  Maybe I won't have to deal with her until spring -- but I'm not going to bet on it.