Tumbling
About a month ago I signed Henry up for tumbling. I thought it would add a little excitement to our relatively quiet weeks, get us out of the house and socialized, you know the drill. Last Wednesday was our first class and it went slightly less than smashingly, to put it mildly. Airplanes are the big love of Henry's life right now, and in one corner of the gym there were a bunch of big plastic ride-on toys which the kids aren't allowed to play on until after the class, and through some weird twist of fate one of them happened to be an airplane. Henry set his sights on it and refused to be distracted by anything else, including rousing renditions of Humpty Dumpty and a trampoline. So he cried hysterically for the entire half hour. Really, I think by the end of the class we were both pretty annoyed with each other. Dave came home for lunch so I could go into the back room and bang my head against the wall until it was time for him to go back to work.
Since I'm a glutton for punishment, I thought we might as well go back this week to see what would happen, only this time Dave came along, the idea being if we were both there enjoying the activities, maybe Henry would too. Last night I started to have some anxiety about it, and this morning as we were walking in I was terrified. Once again Henry ran for the plane, and once again he was directed back to the mats by the teacher. This time he held out a bit longer. He wasn't keen on doing any of the warm-up exercises, but he did enjoy watching Dave try to touch his toes. When we had all lined up to start doing some of the tumbling, Henry suddenly remembered that last week when the class was over the teacher gave everyone of lollipop, which prompted a running chorus of "Oh boy pop! Oh boy pop!" that lasted about two minutes. I explained to him that everyone would get one after class, but first we got to have lots of fun on the trampoline. He wasn't buying it. In fact, he wasn't buying any of the gymnatics stuff we attempted to get him interested in and after the waterworks started we stopped trying and just watched everyone else do it. Or sometimes I would do some of the exercises while holding him. At the end of the class he dried off his tears, ran to his beloved plane, and sat on it with a totally blissed out look on his face. After about five minutes I pulled him off of it so other kids could have a turn and he was okay with that. Not thrilled, but not fussing either. I was pretty proud of him.
At the end of each class the teacher sings "Where is pointer?" and all the kids have to stick out their pointer finger so the teacher can put a sticker on it. Henry didn't like that at all. He had a complete and total meltdown that subsided only when the lollipops came out.
So it was traumatic (again) for all parties involved (again) except this time we inducted Dave into our little group of two (welcome to the club, dad). However, he was amused by more of what was going on this week than he was last week. We're thinking that next time he'll like it a bit more, and maybe, by the last class he'll even want to try a somersault. Or he's just completely not interested in tumbling at all and next week will be our last. I'm completely on the fence. On the one hand he's learning the hard way that sometimes he has to wait to get what he wants (ie. the airplane, lollipops) which is a lesson that's got to happen at some point. On the other hand he doesn't appear inclined to want to do any of the activities, not even the trampoline, which completely blows my mind because it's a trampoline! Bouncy fun! And I feel like if he was interested in the activities then he wouldn't mind waiting to ride on the plane because he'd be having fun doing other stuff. Now that I'm writing it out I'm wondering why we're bothering to go again next week; he's obviously not interested. Except I can't help but wonder how interested he'd be if the plane wasn't there.
Gah. Where's the tylenol?