First Gymnastics Class

Erin had her first gymnastics class today - actually called Peanutbutter & Jelly. She had a LOT of fun running and jumping and playing with the balls. Tom was able to come and watch for a good part of it because the class is in the gym across the street from his office. He watched over Jeff while Erin and I played around mostly.

There are a lot of kids in the class, close to 20 I would guess. Erin does have 1 friend, Gio, who was there this morning. She knows him from play gym. Add 1 or 2 parents/caregivers with each child and it was less than organized chaos this morning. It seemed to me that many of the kids had done it before and were coming back.

Erin's favorite part seemed to be the balls. They had several foam balls around a big open gymnasium and she really wanted to just run around and pick them up. I think she was a little overwhelmed by all the options of things to do.

There was also a smaller room that had real beginning gymnastics equipment -- all of it toddler size. There was a balance beam, a high bar to swing from, some parallel bars to walk through, pads to climb around and tumble on and a vaulting horse to climb onto and them jump off. At first Erin just sort of ran around like a crazy child lost in a sea of people. She really just wanted to run and jump and ignore anything structured. She eventually tried the vault jump and the high bar with the "teacher". She really liked climbing the vault and jumping off it. She also liked climbing over this mountain of mats they had arranged.

At the end of the class the teacher brought out a parachute. All the kids sat in the middle and the parents spun them around slowly. Then the kids all got to crawl around while we made waves. All this was fine. The last part was getting underneath the parachute. The parents lifted it up and down over them -- this was NOT OK with Erin and she made a quick break from underneath. My guess is actually that she didn't like the puff of air that the parachute made in her face when it was coming back down (she's got an anti-wind thing going right now.)

All in all I think this is going to be great for Erin. It's going to help her learn to listen and follow directions while having fun. The teacher was trying to get them to do specific things atone point and Erin really only wanted to play with the ball, but there were very few children there who were doing exactly what the teacher asked. My guess is that eventually they might break the group into two and let one group have free play in the big gym while some other kids work with the teacher on the equipment. At least that's what I hope they end up doing. Either way it's going to be a LOT of fun for us all.