Gymnastics

When I was a kid, the local tv station ran a kids' program called Buster and Me.  It was a show about a puppet/muppet monkey, named Vanilla, her big brother Buster, and their "friend" Robin.  I remember two episodes distinctly.  In one, Buster is attempting to make some money for something by selling forged Ron Cey autographed baseballs - he gets found out when the real Ron Cey shows up and questions the spelling on the ball - "S-A-Y".  The other involves Buster's best friend, Russell, an orangutan who has a crush on Vanilla.  Russell becomes very jealous when Vanilla announces that she "LOVES Jim!" and it's a little while before she let's him know that the "Jim" she loves is "Jim-nastics!"

After Tuesday, I think the Teenies have also fallen for Jim.

Because Caroline is such a climber, we looked into gymnastics classes for the summer.  Unfortunately, the gym clubs near us had limited availability for toddler-level classes and most of them were right around breakfast time.  Another snag is that in this age group, you need to have an adult for each kid.  Lucky for me, my friend Pam owns her very own gymnastics club with tons of tiny kid classes (Gold Star Gymnastics, if you're in the market) - AND she was willing to volunteer her 10 year old as an additional "adult".  The only downside is that the club is in Mountain View, about an hour drive from our house.  But by getting the babes up just a bit before 9, we can feed them, change them into tshirts and shorts, and be in the car by 9:30, so it works out just right.

Yesterday was the first class, and our 10 year old adult was still in school, so Pam stood in as a surrogate parent.  The class starts out with warm-ups, which includes the teeny tinies as well as the next age group up.  There are a series of passes across the floor, running, skipping, tip-toes, etc.  For our guys, that meant just running like mad and trying to stay going the right direction.  Then they do some stretching in a circle - again, a little less structured for us, since it involved following directions.  Then we had to guide them through a couple of circuits involving running down a trampoline and jumping or rolling over mats.  At one point they got to slide into a foam pit, but only Max seemed to really enjoy that.

All in all it was 45 minutes of non-stop activity after which we poured them into the van and hit the road.  About 10 minutes into the drive home, they were all OUT.  When we got home, we put them directly to bed and after 10 minutes of yelping, they were out again.  Until 4pm.  They slept 4.5 hours OR MORE!

Can we do this EVERY DAY?