Active Belle By Land and By Sea

Swimming lessons have been postponed a week due to the "cold weather". Apparently this swimming lessons group takes temperature VERY seriously because they check the kid's temperature every few minutes during the lesson (by pushing on the bottom of their foot... if the white doesn't go away in less than 5 seconds, the kid is too cold to continue the lesson) and the "cold weather" we have is only in the low 70s! Oh well... fortunately we don't have any vacation or anything in early June so postponing works for us.

Today at gymnastics I noticed Belle doing 3 things that she hasn't really been doing until now. First, she actually got some air on the trampoline when she jumped! It was only like half an inch, but that's more than she's ever gotten before. She tries to jump at home all the time and wants to so bad, so I'm sure she'll be jumping everywhere before long. Second, she did a sommersaut down one of the wedges all by herself. She tries to do them at home and gets her head on the floor all tucked under and her butt in the air, but can't quite push herself over. Again... with how often she tries this, I'm sure she'll be doing it soon. And the 3rd thing is the balance beam! When we first started tumbleweeds Annabelle had just started walking so of course she wasn't trying to walk in a straight line on the balance beam. Every couple of weeks I'd put her on one to try it, and just recently she has started trying to stay on. Last week she walked all the way across a beam that's only about 3 inches off of the ground all by herself (the TOP of the beam is only about 3 inches from the ground), and today she walked across some of the higher ones with me holding her hands and she stayed on the beams! One thing that she still won't try is holding on to the bar... she seems to have no interest in "hanging" at all, but I wonder how long it will be before she does. This session of tumbleweeds ends at the end of this month, and I have been debating whether or not to sign Belle up for the summer session (since I'm getting bigger and bigger now and it's getting harder to keep up with her), but these accomplishments and seeing how much fun Belle has at the classes has convinced me that we should sign up again. Keith loves to go to the class too, so I know that he'd be glad to take over if I just can't do it anymore. The summer session ends in early August so I'll be waddling around the class by then, but it's worth it to see Belle so excited.

One more thing... at tumbleweeds today one of the other mommies commented that Belle is so cute and so "petite". :) She hasn't been called anything resembing little (compared to other kids her same age, of course) since she was just a few months old. The mommy who said that has a 17 month old boy (Belle's 15 months now) who is actually a couple of inches shorter than Belle, so it was funny to me that she made that comment. I wasn't insulted by any means... just always hear the opposite about how tall she is so it was funny to hear someone call her petite. :)