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.]