Wednesdays

I love Wednesdays.  I get to spend a little bit of special time with each of my girls on Wednesdays.  Miss goes to school and Lass and I run errands or just hang out and play in the morning.  Then I take Miss to gymnastics in the afternoon.  She loves gymnastics.

Note: All of these gymnastics pictures were taken at least six months ago, probably more like nine months.  Unfortunately, I don't have any recent photos of her at gymnastics.

Miss has gotten so much braver and stronger since these photos were taken.  She used to be somewhat fearful about doing certain things by herself, like going down the slide, or jumping from a height she perceived to be too high.

In spite of encouragements to try it herself, she used to insist on holding my hand.

Now she jumps from much greater heights by herself.  Occasionally she still comes up to a jump that makes her nervous, but with encouragement she'll usually even go for those by herself.

She used to need lots of help doing this "strong arms" move down the beams.  Now she not only does it totally by herself, she's fast!

Today she even insisted on trying to do a headstand by herself.

One thing that still makes her a bit nervous is walking the balance bean if it is raised up off the floor at all.  But she's even getting better at that.  Today I was so proud of her, because although she was clearly nervous, she did walk the whole length of the beam herself.  She did it shuffling her feet in tiny, tiny steps, but she did it.  And at the end she jumped off and yelled, "I did it!"  It was awesome.

Gymnastics class with Miss is a blast and I am always so entertained and awed by watching her learn new things so quickly.

In addition to enjoying spending time with her in class, I like to savor the car rides to and fro.  Now that it's dark out when we go, she often comments on the Christmas lights she sees.  Tonight we sang to Christmas music.  Her favorite is "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Deer" followed closely by the Chipmunks Christmas song.  She half-sings, half hums along with that one until the line "Me, I want a hooooola hoooop," which she nails every time.

And since gymnastics class runs right up to dinner time, often we treat ourselves to some take out dinner.  Lately we've been getting an extra special treat of Culver's on Wednesday nights, complete with frozen custard sundaes for dessert (mine is still waiting for me in the freezer...)  Of course, Culver's has very little post-dinner clean up, which leaves plenty of time for my favorite part of the day, between dinner and bedtime when we listen to music and play.  Christmas music and wrestling/chasing/tickling with Daddy were on the agenda tonight.

I love Wednesdays.  Frozen custard is calling me.