Wednesday, August 08, 2007

extracurricular activities


Watching a child day after day can become challenging. I can't say Elijah is not a perfect little boy, but let's face it, perfect little boys whine, too. And they get bored. And they teethe. Their feet get stuck in the crib and they wake up from a nap early in a cranky mood. And they don't want hot cereal for breakfast because Mommy dumped too much salt into it. The list goes on. So it helps to have scheduled things to do to bring variety to our days. After all, there are only so many times a day you can put together the alphabet puzzle. Enter extracurricular activities.

Now, I am not sure if you can actually call them "extracurricular" since there's no real "curriculum" Elijah is following, so feel free to suggest another term. Meanwhile, we attend a gym class on Fridays and go to the pool about once every three weeks (that's how long it takes me to recover from each trip :)).

Turns out, Elijah doesn't really like crowds. Who is surprised? Raise your hand. I guess it only makes sense with two parents on the introverted side, with one of them way off the chart. When the pool got too crowded today, Elijah opted for a chair and a bag of gold fish. Once the fish were gone, we just went home. Neither is he interested in paying attention during the structured part of the gym class. While other toddlers (ok, they are mostly older than Elijah) are sitting in a circle singing songs and counting to ten, he is off doing his own thing.


Having something special to do every once in a while helps maintain my sanity and creates great memories (it also makes for great pictures!) Today at the pool, after taking the picture above, I sat down on the ground next to the chair from which Elijah was observing the chaos of the pool. Almost right away he got off the chair and wanted to nestle next to me. Now, how sweet is that? :)
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