Our little beasts

This morning we went to a free trial class at the nearby family owned, Little Gym.  It’s pricey so we aren’t sure we’ll join, but glad we did an intro class.  It was 45 min long, right before nap and they had a BLAST!  The class they’re in is called ‘Little Beasts’ and the kids range in age 19 months to 2.5 yrs.

We started with introductions and the balance beam.  Neither of the kids were sure about it, and Charlotte was the only one to finish walking across the beam.  Then we had warm up where we first walked in a circle and went over the beam, then just ran around in a circle.  By now Charlotte was really into because we were singing the alphabet song too.  Cooper decided running around in a circle was boring and went off to explore, mostly to figure out how many doors he could open and to locate all the electrical sockets in the room.  Chris had to keep bringing him back to the group.

After warm up we had free time on all the equipment before we did the ‘airplane runway’ where they jump down a bouncy runway.  They both loved exploring on all the equipment and when it came time to jump, Charlotte was afraid of the sound (the machine constantly blew air into the bouncy runway), but Cooper couldn’t get enough.  He would run as fast as he could down the runway, jump off and run to get in line again.  I had a hard time making him wait his turn.  When the teacher deflated the runway all the boys (including Cooper) climbed on top and helped get the air out, while all the girls stayed away.

After the runway we had the sideways step on the balance beam.  Cooper did it for about 3 steps, but wanted to run and explore some more and Charlotte wanted to do the sideways walk over and over.  Then came time for somersaults down the ramp and only Charlotte had the patience to do it.  She thought it was silly and laughed, but once was enough for her.  Cooper meanwhile wanted to swing from all the bars.  The kid has giant hands and is super strong so he could swing for awhile and even lift his legs to his chest.  I couldn’t believe how strong he was.  He would let go without a thought in the world, fall on his back and get up wanting more.

Then the next exercise was walking sideways across the lower bar of the parallel bars while holding on to the higher bar.  Cooper did this for a step or two, but wasn’t really coordinated enough to understand how to do it.  Charlotte got scared and wouldn’t stay up, so we quickly got her down.  Then it was ball time.  Charlotte and Cooper kept kicking and throwing their balls and then with all of the other kids, parents, and balls they got frustrated quickly.  Charlotte and another little boy collided and his mouth hit her head.  They were both okay, but Charlotte was done with ball time.

The last part of the class was teeny, tiny bubbles!  Thousands and thousands of them.  Both of them LOVED this and after Cooper smooshed as many bubbles on the floor with his thumb as he could, they both ran over to the little gymnast bar to do some more swinging and flipping.  They willingly left when class was over (Chris and I were even tired!), downed their snack and water in the car, and went down easily and quickly for nap.  They slept for 2.5 hours and were little angels all afternoon.  I wish every day could be like today.

We definitely need to enroll them in some kind of weekly gym session after seeing how much fun they had (and we had), but I think this one is way too pricey.  It’s nearly $20 per class, per kid and class is only once a week.  I think we can find something a little less expensive.   Plus some of the other gyms offer parents’ night out and mother’s (in our case father’s) day out as well for a reasonable babysitting fee.  Chris and I could really use something like this, so we’ll probably go to a few other free trial classes and pick the one we like.