Natalie did a GREAT job during her two weeks of swimming lessons! I am really glad that we decided to go with these semi-private lessons, it was totally worth the expense and the daily drive to Newbury Park.  It was fun to see Natalie’s water skills improve so much over such a short time.  At the end of the first week, she was grumpy, tired, and not happy at all that the no-nonsense teacher was making her do so many hard things.  She told me she didn’t want to swim any more.  But after the holiday weekend to recuperate, she went back and LOVED it.

One day Natalie saw one of the older classes jumping off the diving board, and became obsessed with it (which I thought was funny since she was kind of scared of the water and hated putting her face in it).  On the last day, the three kids in her class got to jump too.  I was really surprised, but she came up smiling, then jumped a second time!

At three years old, it is pretty hard to be coordinated enough to swim with arms and legs at the same time.  Natalie got a lot of practice with the kick board and empty milk bottles (genius idea).  As you can see, she is all smiles in these pictures.  She gained so much confidence by the last day, she even let go of the side and floundered around a bit, whoops… thankfully she’s become practiced at holding her breath, and managed to come up not even sputtering.

She can float like this for 10 seconds! Hopefully we can get enough pool time to keep her skills up this summer.

I think these pictures speak to the emotional roller coaster that is The Life of Natalie.  I like it when I manage to capture what the kids are going through.  I think these shots sum her up pretty well.

Most days, I try to have a little casual time where Natalie and I work on her letters and numbers. Occasionally I see that some of it is sinking in, which is encouraging and makes me think that maybe we really could home school our kids (that’s the plan for now).

The other day I asked Natalie to write her name, and this is what she came up with all on her own:

Okay, so it may not look like much, but– the first letter is “N” (she really likes to write N’s but gets carried away sometimes), the second letter is “t” (obviously) and the third is “0″, which makes sense to Natalie because she pronounces her own name “Na-toe-lie” and routinely insists that there is an “o” in her name.

I asked her to do it again and she improved a bit on the N:

I know I’m just an overly excited parent, but I was really happy to see her little thought process playing out here. I’m sure sure she will be writing “Nata” (or maybe “Nato”?) before we know it.

She also likes to “i” and “w”, as seen here, along with more “t”. She has no interest in “a” for some reason.

PS- I promise there will be a Ben post soon, since he did have a birthday and all!

Well, this is a picture of how Natalie spent her first ballet recital.  She got a little nervous and didn’t want to go on stage, but it’s okay (though I think she regretted it later when her class came on and she knew the dance!).  Natalie has learned a lot of ballet steps since beginning the class though, and gave us a personal recital afterwards.  Perhaps there will be more performances in her future.