Holiday and Show Week preparations at The Little Gym of Lake Oswego

In my last post, I said that I’d give you some insight as to what we’re doing to prepare for the holidays, for Show Week, and for the upcoming Winter/Spring semester.
Well… the holidays are almost over. We had winter camps this past week, with themes from Holiday Goofy Games to New Year’s Beach Bash. It was a time for your kids to blow off some steam, and for me to do some back office work. Teachers Kelly and Amy went to the East Coast to see their family (hopefully the recent East Coast storms will let them come back this week). And Adam, Angela, Nicole, Michael, and Makenzie manned the camps. Angela was in her element… she traded shifts with me a couple of times so she could be in extra camps with your children.

I’m excited because I was able to place orders for Show Week certificates, some cool medals and ribbons we’ll be handing out to your children during Show Week, Show Week dance costumes, *and* I was able to reformat my PC’s hard drive and reinstall everything. You know how 3-year old PCs can get. Now I’m finally able to get all of the latest Microsoft security patches installed. Yay! (Yes, I’m not only a great singer, but I’m also a computer geek.)

Teacher Alex also came on board last week. We are indoctrinating her in The Little Gym philosophy of growing skills in your children in a fun, nurturing way, growing self-esteem along with rolls, jumps, and cartwheels. If you’re at the gym this week, say hi. She’s going to be training hard in our Pre/K and Grade school gymnastics and dance, sports skills and karate classes. We’re also interviewing a few other folks this week. It’s hard to find the right combination of love of children, customer service, attention to detail, and silliness.   We'll be in heavy-duty training mode over the next 4 weeks, getting Alex and the others up to the levels we expect our teachers to perform at.

In addition to all of these things, we managed to cut several hundred strips of crepe paper for our camp octopus craft, and 700+ strips of construction paper and 88 tiny eyes for our snake craft.

The only thing I can’t find the time to squeeze in, is how to work off all of the calories I ingested during the holidays. Several parents brought in some treats for the instructors to share. Thanks for thinking of us!  The cheese "snow balls" were quite popular. 

We hope you had a great holiday and will have a fun New Year’s, and we hope 2010 is full lots of memorable experiences.   [We just had one tonight.  We're finishing off some pumpkin pie which my son, Blaise won't touch.  So he's having a little bit of vanilla ice cream.  We have a couple of different ice cream syrups left over from Freya's birthday party so Blaise went to get them from the fridge to add some color and flavor.  He pulled out the two squeeze jars.   As he was putting them on the kitchen table, Blaise yelled out in surprise.  We all turned and realized at the same instant that he had plled out a jar of Hershey's chocoloate sauce, and a jar of Italian dressing -- one of the last things Blaise would ever be caught eating.  The ensuing laughter was a nice "cherry" on the top of a nice weekend.]

Holiday Musings from Teacher Ron

Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But The Little Gym is sure delightful,
When the cold rains start to blow,
Come and tumble, swing, balance, and grow!

Have you listened to our new voicemail message yet? I spent about 45 minutes last Sunday morning composing it. The paragraph above is the first stanza -- sung to the tune of "Let is Snow." 

I've been meaning to do something fun to update our outgoing message and finally sat down and just did it.  Let me know what you think!  Call (503) 595-9702 to listen to it.

Yes, it's almost Christmas, a time to have fun, exchange gifts, and stress out.  My family celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas.  And when we find a fun Kwanzaa event, we'll often join in too. 

Personally, I'm not much into the planning aspect of the holidays.  I'm lucky that my wife, Marie, really wants to focus on the humanistic side of this time of the year.   Last year, we found a pretty cool tradition that we started incorporating into our family's traditions.  Each day of December, we do a simple ceremony after dinner.  We light candles of peace, hope, love, etc..,  say some kind of reading and discuss it, then we open up a tiny bag and pull out a tiny card that has an activity that we're to do the following day.  The other day was my son's "special day".  Marie took some time off from work and went to Blaise's school to have lunch with him.  Last night we found a local giving tree and purchased gifts for 2 children in need.   This morning we did a Super Secret Special Surprise -- we went to our children's classrooms at 7am and put a secret gift on the desk of each child.  

We bought a kit from Advent Bag & Box (http://www.adventbagandbox.com/) to do this.   (We have no affiliation with them.)  We didn't buy the acompanying book so we're winging it a little bit.  But this is a fun and mostly easy tradition to do.  Our kids calm down enough to do the ceremony and we haven't burned down the kitchen table yet.  Tonight we'll be doing "Advent" plus lighting our menorah.   Maybe we'll make some super-greasy potato pancakes (a la Grandma Esther's recipe). 

What traditions do you and your family have?  (And can we steal them for our family?)  :-)

For my next post, I'll let you know what The Little Gym is doing to prepare for the holidays, for Show Week, and for the upcoming Winter/Spring semester.

I'm looking for "Video Veg day".  Maybe it'll be one day this weekend?  Marie?

Happy Holidays,
  Ron and The Little Gym of Lake Oswego team