Then, she traipsed into my bedroom at 6:30 in the morning to tell me, "Mama? I did the thing that it SAYS for Saturday, so I got up early and cleaned my room, but, uh, it says to make yourself a STAR, and I don't know what to make it with."
Totally worth waking me up for.
I suggested she take some printer paper and draw a star, then cut it out, so now her star is proudly displayed on the wall of her bedroom:
In other news, not only has Julia taken a bold new step in practicing her skills on the monkey bars, but she also got to try a kneeling dive off the diving block for the first time at swim lessons yesterday:
Her instructor helped her get into perfect position, then left her to do the rest on her own. Upwards sprang Julia's knee from the diving board, pushing her body up and into the air, and....MASSIVE belly flop. To the point that the teacher was wincing as she hit the water.
No matter. Julia was happy as a clam, completely unaware of the fact that she had hit the water flat on her belly. After her lesson, she asked me, beaming, "So Mama, were you, like the MOST proud of me you ever did when I did my DIVE? Was that, like, the FURTHEST I ever went into the water?" I heaped effusive praise onto her, which led her to prompt, "Mama, were you thinking that I would say I wanted to dive off of the EDGE because I was too NERVOUS to try the diving block?"
I actually was surprised that she was so bold, given that she has heretofore only dived off the edge of the pool, so I made sure to play that up. "I couldn't BELIEVE you tried it off the diving block! I was SURE you were going to say you wanted to do it off the edge again, but then I looked and there you were kneeling on the diving block. You SURPRISED me!"
Between the dive and the fact that Julia was able to swim several lengths of the pool freestyle, without needing to grab onto the wall or pause for a rest, I'd say it was a pretty satisfying swim lesson for her.
Thank goodness, because we certainly had a lot of panic and drama leading up to the lesson. We were late, thanks in large part to the fact that Julia decided that four of her dolls (Linsy, May, Elina and Jenny) were going to swim lessons too, and needed to be stripped of their dresses and put into make-shift bathing suits and come in the car with us. I was left carrying a heaping pile of baby blankets, aka towels for the dolls, and Julia was on the verge of freaking out over the fact that her dolls didn't have their seatbelts on. Hence, my passenger seat driving companions:
Madeleine got pretty invested in some pretend play with a doll yesterday as well, parading around the house, back and forth through rooms with Baby Dashiell in a back-carrier. For those who didn't see it on facebook, the name of the game she was playing was, according to Madeleine: "Baby Gets Carried Around in a Backpack."
Wow, Julia is really advancing on her swimming skills. So proud of her. Did the four front passenger girls get to go into the pool, I wonder. Madeleine certainly needs to work on her child safety skills when it comes to backpacking her children. Love, Yiayia
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