Sporty

Sorry for being MIA. A lot going on recently and been crazy busy at work and needed a break from blogging.

Maya has recently been emerging as a little sports fiend, and we have been indulging her sports desires through a bit of overprogramming.

She has been pining away for gymnastics since we lived in Zamalek, where there was a huge gymnastics program at the Gazeera Club, which we are no longer members of. I hadn't been able to find any equivalent classes here that would take a child only three years old. But with her dance classes ending for the season, I knew she needed another activity to keep her busy this summer.

I heard that there was an Olympic training center near our neighborhood where some expats use the pool. So I found their phone number and called them, and they said they had "gumbaz" classes for kids age 4-6. Gumbaz is more like tumbling classes, or so I found out after I looked it up in the dictionary, since I had no idea what they were talking about on the phone.

On Friday, we went with a friend to check out the classes. I was worried they wouldn't let Maya in since she's only 3, but they never even asked me how old she was. The center has a full gymnastic training gym and then a huge padded tumbling room for the class for little kids. The class was two hours long, and had about 35 kids and two instructors.

Basically, the kids run around for the first hour doing various types of warmups. Jumping like a frog, crawling races, skipping, hopping and so on. Then they split off by gender and do the fun stuff -- learning somersaults and cartwheels and handstands. The class is all in Arabic. But Maya doesn't seem to notice the language difference at all.

Maya really loved the class. The only downside is the center administrators kept trying to kick all the parents out of the room during the class, which was really annoying and made Maya a bit nervous. Hopefully she will be OK next week.

On top of that, we signed Maya up for tennis lessons, which she started today. She also loves tennis, and she can already hit the ball. How she can do this at age 3, I really don't understand. She's just sporty. Plus today in her swimming lessons (right after her hour-long tennis lesson), she swam the entire LENGTH of the pool without stopping. How does she do it?

Honestly, just thinking about her activity level makes me feel exhausted.

Yesterday we had: Gymnastics class (2 hours). Then lunch, where she barely ate anything. Then dance recital. Then several hours of play on the playground. Then an outdoor kids movie at our club. But of course Maya decided to keep playing rather than watch.

Today we had: Birthday party with bouncy castle for a friend, followed by swimming in the pool for two hours, followed by a snack, followed by 45 minutes of playground time, followed by an hour tennis lesson, followed by an hour swim lesson. Then she played on the playground for another hour and had half a kids' hamburger and then complained when we said it was time to go home.

Is this level of activity normal for a 3-year-old?????

The rear-view mirror...

...has been glued back on. Yeah! Let's hope it stays that way.

At the club

Car troubles

So about a year ago we had the windshield on our car replaced. The car mafia uses the windshield wipers to mark which cars need dusting. A car with the wipers up needs dusting. Then when the car is dusted, the mafia slams down the wipers. Well, the rubber wore off our wipers, leaving an exposed metal blade. And repeated slamming cracked our windshield. Lame, I know.

So we sent our car to the Toyota service center in Egypt to replace the windshield, and our windshield was replaced.

Fast forward to this weekend. We were driving to the beach in Ain Sokhna. We crossed a railroad track about 5 minutes from our hotel. It was bumpy. As we bumped over the tracks, the rear-view mirror simply fell off the windshield and into Mike's lap. We picked it up and looked at it. The Toyota service people had simply glued it to the windshield.

Now I am not really sure how these things are supposed to be attached. But I'm pretty sure that it was not done the proper way. I mean, who ever heard of a rear-view mirror falling off before?? Our next task, glueing it back on...

Cooking with grandma

Maya has had a great time with her grandparents, although her own temperament has been a bit hit-or-miss and she keeps flitting back and forth between what she wants to do one minute and then wanting another thing 10 seconds later. Aaah. Three-year-olds!!

Caught in the kitchen

I had all the ingredients ready to make banana bread out on the counter when Maya and Mike came home from playground the other day. I was in the living room and Mike was somewhere else as well. Maya got into the kitchen, took out the cookie cutters, unwrapped the butter, and began trying to "make cookies". Fun! Mike caught her in the act.

The grimace is when Maya tried to drink the vanilla. You know, it smells good. But it doesn't taste very good...

Maya's new school

Here are a couple of shots of Maya in her new school, or rather same school with new facilities. Most of the pictures have other kids in them, so I can't post a lot. But the new school building is a huge improvement over the old school. There is so much more room indoors, and a lot more outside space for the kids to play. I hope the extra space means they will get to do a lot more interesting projects!

On another note, you might have noticed that Maya is completely dressing herself these days. In these pictures, her outfit is a purple striped dress over a yellow skirt over striped pink pajama pants, with bright yellow socks and new sneakers her grandparents brought from the USA.

Today, she wanted to wear a green T-shirt and pink tights. She was NOT happy with our insistence that she had to put something, anything really, on over the tights.