Preschool & Swimming Lessons

The school year has begun and so have we! Our schedule got thrown for a loop on our very first day. I planned to start on Monday, completely forgetting it was a holiday, so I rearranged plans to fit into the new 4-day week. Then, a woman from the ward offered preschool-age swimming lessons for a few weeks and I scrambled to rearrange my schedule once more to allow for the 3 weeks of 3x/week lessons. Conveniently, I already had plans for an interrupted schedule on Wednesdays and Fridays (story time and grocery shopping days, respectively), but Monday had to be altered and all those lessons had to be shifted.

However, the new temporary schedule is in place.  Yesterday was more or less a miss in terms of following the schedule, but that was because I didn't get around to re-working the schedule until yesterday afternoon. We did get about an hour of working together on letters and shapes and it did give me a good insight as to the capabilities of each of the girls moving forward. For example, Cadence, my little budding artist, can trace and write like the almost-kindergarten-aged child she is. Megan, however, is much younger and not so advanced in her fine motor skills, and has difficulty tracing even a straight line. She's also still ambidextrous and is starting to favor her left hand, but this could be the natural ambidextrous tendencies from the lack of refined fine motor skills (a preference is often only shown as the fine motor skills improve).

Today went better. We spent about 45 minutes doing "paperwork", before we moved on to some ribbon dancing to classical music (to make up for no swim lessons) and geometric shape puzzles (you know, the yellow hexagons and blue parallelograms made into flowers and fish shapes). Tomorrow will be our first "full day", complete with a lesson about magnets, an art project, and a "journal page" (where they write the word of the week and draw a picture).

As for swimming, we haven't started the actual lessons yet. Yesterday was just for the teacher to evaluate their current ability. As expected, both girls are in the "beginner" class. Cadence did surprisingly well. She didn't swim, but she took to the water better than I expected and did her best to do what was asked of her. Megan took a little longer to warm up to the idea and only did the exercises because I bribed her. They paddled and kicked and tried to float while supported by the teacher.

Our first lesson was supposed to be today, but Connor and Cadence went to bed with stuffy noses and a dry cough and woke up with mild fevers. Thankfully, the cold seems to be a minor one, but I chose to keep all the kids home, let them sleep in, and relax for the day so we can be in good health for the next lesson on Friday! I will hopefully have pictures to be included later once they've advanced enough for me to make another brag post, I mean blog post. ;-)