Sophie update

We have a play room bursting with toys, large plastic things eating space, boxes and boxes of small bits and bobs, but Sophie never seems to play with them.  When they are new she has that new toy excitement and i think yipee she is playing but it wears off a few days later and they hang around collecting dust.  Now i have a room i want to reclaim but am holding onto incase Ella may want to play with them.   

Although she has no passion for toys she has a passion for activity, cooking in the kitchen with me, dancing with mummy or fake singing opera again with me in the kitchen for a while she was making shapes with her body and holding them and doing special moves and balancing and asking me to watch, this wasnt a passing fad so i enrolled her into a gymnastic program.  She loved it and watched her instructor and came home and practiced the moves and showed me what she had learnt after 2 weeks she got her first certificate level 10 few more weeks she has reached level 9 she really enjoys the classes.  Her instructor has said that she shows real talent and aptitude and that when she teaches her that she really pays attention, listens and does what she has been taught.    

Another activity Sophie really enjoys is swimming and from around 3 month i have tried to give her the best start in swimming and we got all the way up to the age of 2 with out armbands and lots of confidence however i took 6 month out from swimming as i had a bad experience with another mean mummy and then was pregnant so we had to had to start re building the confidence and Sophie relished the challenge and soon was diving for sticks from the bottom of the pool, jumping and diving in the pool and swimming with her face under the water for short periods of time, as you can see from these videos from when she was 3 and a half. Even then she wanted to be like Tom Daley which is where this diving has come from.

  

Then Ella came along meaning no more swimming for me and daddy took over and has made even better progress with width swimming with her to a point she is now a proper little fish in the water and in 5 weeks time she and daddy are planning a swimming gala for my return to the pool with Ella and she promises me a full on show with lots of swimming, diving and proper breathing and technique in strokes.  

Soph now also want to do dancing and does impromptu routines for me i have been giving ballet dancing routines all made up from what she thinks ballet dancers do and monster dancing which is a sight to behold, bless her she really does try so hard as shows real enthusiasm. Was kids life like this when we were little i have no idea of this alas and i hear from other parents and they are carting their kids from one class to another to give them the excellent starts to socialising, learning about rules, routine, winning and loosing as well as the skills that come from the endless classes in football, ballet, fencing, swimming, drama clubs, beavers etc it seems kids today have so much extra curicular activities that it even extended into their futures that colleges and university's and work all want to know what these kids who have grown into people do as extra life skills, and it seems to hold a lot more importance to the making of a child's personality than it did back when i was a sprat. 

I think we are going to have to scratch around for more funds for maybe some dance classes or even swimming classes as the pool where we swim at is where they train the Olympic swimmers and she already has her eye on a prize of swimming like the bigger girls... maybe i could sell a few lump of plastic to fund this.