My Little Gymnast

X-man started a semester worth of classes at the Little Gym in Savoy today. He tested it out two weeks ago during the snow day, but it was just him and one other little girl. Then he got to go to a birthday party there for one of our neighbors and a fellow NG Tiger.

The first time he was a bit shy. He didn't understand that he was going from one kind of school to another. It's my fault. I maybe shouldn't have called the Little Gym instructor a teacher. Maybe I should call them coaches? But today, all the Funny Bugs (kids ages 3-4) and Giggle Worms (ages 4-5) were there for the first day of their combined class. There were 20 of them, which is a normal pre-school class size, but they had three teachers. With all of the kids, parents and younger siblings X-man was a bit overwhelmed. We entered the gym to get our pottying out of the way. And when the teacher welcomed the kids into the gym, he didn't even say goodbye. He ran into the gym and sat down on the floor with the other teacher.

He did awesome forward rolls, scaled the climbing wall, swung like a monkey on the bars and worked on his balance beam (he seems a bit apprehensive of this one by himself). The class worked on "safety rolls" and he adored the fact that they split into teams and pretended to be trains to get from place to place while singing "Down by the Station." I loved watching him have fun, and in my mind I kept thinking to the day I met his physical therapist when he was eight weeks old about his torticollis. "He'll need to be active. You'll need to provide lots of play and activity that works his left side as well as his right. He's always going to naturally want to go to his right hand, so encourage different movement. Swimming, tumbling, dance are all great choices for little kids. But he's got to love it to want to do it."

An hour later, he was spent, but completely happy. "We go there again soon, Mom?"

"Every Thursday at 4, Baby. From now until summer comes." (Then I think we're going to try swim lessons.)

He got home and had a piece of left over pizza and some milk. Then he played quietly with Legos for pretty much an hour and a half, before he and MacTroll CREAMED their tennis competition on the Wii. Seriously, if you need an aggressive, crazy man at the net -- X-man is so your teammate.

He was in the bath at 8 p.m, but is refusing to sleep for MacTroll right now.