The Best of Halifax…my Award of Excellence…

Remember the flexed-arm hang?

It was part of the Participaction Award of Excellence. That shiny badge you’d get in gym class…awarded to the very best…those who could jump and run and whack balls and shimmy a rope all the way to the top where they’d tap the ceiling of the gym and everyone would cheer before they’d slide back down!

How incredibly awesome were those pretty round badges with the logo in the center…its shiny threads depicting the colour of the award received so everyone in the school would know how awesome you were!

Yeah…I hated every minute of it.

I think I got Bronze once…but mostly I got the lowly “Participaction” award without the sparkly thread that screamed “LOSER” and didn’t exactly warrant me having my mother sew the patch to the side of my gym bag like the “Award of Excellence” kids did.

Nope…I sucked at gym class. I felt completely out of my element…judged for my inability to make my body work in any way other than lanky, uncoordinated and awkward. On the days they’d pick “captains” to divide the class into teams…I’d nervously wait knowing I’d be the last one picked…sometimes hearing one captain say to the other, “you can keep the rest”…as if giving them the three final picks wasn’t going to make any difference anyway.

Unfortunately, you could only claim being on your period once in any given month so I had to time that perfectly to the sport I hated worse.

I was “Bookish” if you will. I loved to read…made up stories for fun, wrote poems, doodled on my notebooks with hearts and stars and names of boys I liked on that particular week (who sadly were often the Award of Excellence winners!) If there was a Participaction Award for “Head in the Clouds”…I would have had it…hands down!

For the last four years, I’ve won “Best Blogger” in The Coast’s Best of Halifax…and I’m super proud. I feel like one of those Award of Excellence winners in gym class on the day the awards get handed out and I’m all…HEY…LOOK AT ME…I GOT AN AWARD FOR DOING SOMETHING I’M ACTUALLY PRETTY GOOD AT TOO!

Winning “Best of Halifax” is my “Award of Excellence” but not because of the crunches and sit-ups and push-ups and squats…though I have to admit…somedays writing is quite the work out! I spill my guts on a regular basis and the days I’m left bawling on my couch…every fibre of my being poured out onto my keyboard…those are the days and posts you seem to like best! Sometimes, if I read through a post and if it cracks me up…chances are you’re chuckling when I publish the post as well. Often, folks tell me that something I said was HILARIOUS and inside I’m thinking…WTF…that was my deepest, darkest, most horrible moment! Somedays, it takes hours and hours to get out two paragraphs and other days, 1,000 words pound out in five minutes.

I feel uncomfortable a lot of the time. I’m left dangling on a regular basis…hanging on for dear life while my feet don’t quite touch the ground…knowing that any given moment I could collapse in a heap because I’ve just thrown everything I have into that one post. This blog…THIS is my flexed arm hang!

I’m proud to get an award for blogging. I work hard. I market myself to align myself with brands both locally and nationally and I’m financially rewarded for something I love to do! It’s kind of amazing really when I think about it…how I’d always wanted to be a writer but was too scared to fail…scared of being judged…and here I am, writing a blog that people actually read! And share! And Like!

But, while I’ve just won an award titled “Best Blogger” for “Best of Halifax”…I’m not the best. Far from it. It’s my readership who supports what I do and who voted for me…you guys are the best…you make this blog awesome. You enjoy listening to me spill it all out there because my thoughts, my failures, my every day happenings with raising kids and just trying to get through a day without embarrassing myself…they make you feel “normal.” I tell stories that have people nodding their heads in that “we’re all in this together” attitude that makes us feel a little less alone. A little less like the last person picked in gym class.

I’m not the “Best Blogger” in Halifax because there are so many other bloggers doing it just as well as I am! I’d be a horrible fashion blogger and a miserable food blogger and I shy away from a lot of adventures which would make me a pretty lame travel blogger…so it’s a little difficult to compare one blogger against another when our blogs are so completely different. I know I’m good…but I don’t really think of myself as “better” than others. This blogging community that I’m part of…it’s pretty amazing…it’s full of encouraging men and women who are willing to help out and offer advice…who share opportunities and find ways to work together. We’re a community of like-minded people who believe in building one another up…working together instead of against one another.

It’s these other bloggers…my colleagues…and it’s my readers, who make Curtains are Open the best it can possibly be!

A sincere THANK YOU to everyone who follows me and voted for me. Thanks to the brands that continue to work with me and to the many, many bloggers who play a huge role in making Curtains are Open what it is. Without all of that support…all of the advice and encouragement…the curtains would have closed a long time ago.

Cheers to all of us who are doing what we love…who are striving to be the very best we can possibly be!

Here’s to shimmying up that rope…all the way to the very top and tapping that ceiling while everyone cheers us on…ready to catch us, when we fall.

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As for the folks in the picture:

Pat Busby is AMAZING at what he does. He spends a lot of time with Bones and her volleyball team at his gym, ProEdge Sports Conditioning, making sure they’re the very best they can be. I’ve watched him do push-ups and crunches and squats and weights…all with a smile on his face…happy to teach and help people reach their full potential. Chances are, he got the Award of Excellence in gym class.

Kathy Breau is one of the hardest working women I know. I wrote about her in this KIA Working Mom post. Kathy is a sales rep with Loreal and if there was a Best of Halifax for Sales Reps…she’d win it…hands down.

I have no idea who the photographer is who worked at the Best of Halifax event last night. But he takes a pretty good selfie!