Action

I will admit upfront I am not the kind of mom that schedules her kids to the minute. Most of the time, I’m happy to let them play with the masses of toys they’ve acquired (and I can’t seem to get rid of. It’s a minefield over here!). I join in when they want me, and I leave them to their imaginations when they’re engrossed in their own tiny worlds.

Today, I actually had an Activity-with-a-Capital-A. The local library offers a Gymboree class once a month, and today was the day. My knowledge of Gymboree is that it’s a somewhat structured class for small fries intertwining music, physical activity, and who knows what else. I had already heard about it when my mom sent me a link to remind me. So off we went.

We hit both sides of the luck coin showing up a little bit early. We managed to score tickets – you had to have a pass to participate, but you just picked them up at the front desk) – but then we had to wait around for half an hour. One mom, one preschooler, and one baby in a library. Where it’s supposed to be quiet. Heh.

Apparently, this is a fairly popular event, because I heard another mom telling a friend that all the tickets were gone. And with so many other kids running around the children’s area, no one could single out my kids as the noise makers (in truth, Sammy did talk a little bit, but he was relatively well behaved and not really loud at all, and once I pulled Sabrina out of the stroller, she was fine).

We herded into the library conference room and sat around the edge of one of those play parachutes. Sammy was likely the oldest kid there, and certainly the tallest. With a lot of itty bitties (Sabrina was really too young and only there because I couldn’t lock her in her room leave her at home alone, but some of the others didn’t look much older), there wasn’t much chance of a lot of direction following. We sang a few songs, blew some bubbles, lifted the parachute over the kids’ heads, and that was about it. I expected a bit more on the less-burn-off-some-juvenile-energy scale, but Sammy was happy when the teacher stamped a clown face of each of his hands. Sabrina enjoyed crawling around like a mad thing in a new environment, and we got out of the house for half a second, so I’ll put it in the win column.

(I bought the camera with the intention of putting up some photos of the day, but since the moms were the ones participating really, I didn’t get the opportunity to take any. One day, I’ll get it together.)