Playing With Others

Yarden and her best friend - Mirror Baby

Every Sunday at noon, Seamus, Yarden & I host an Outside The Box class at our house.

It's an amazing educational play program started by a former breakdancer turned doula/innovative children's educator. Every other week is a "Sensory" class, so Yarden's dug for treasures in sand, crawled around in a lentil filled baby pool, swam in "wiggly worms", played baby soccer, climbed a mountain of cell phones and remotes and done full body fingerpainting. There's a few dozen Sunday adventures that that I never would never have imagined.

And yes, of course there are photos - http://aliyahandseamus.smugmug.com/Children
Here are a few if you don't feel like browsing...

Yarden and the spider.

Yarden as baby scientist.
Glamorous in her blue scarf.
Gnawing on her riches.
Climbing a drum.

So we spend our Sundays with James, Max, Finley, Ricardo, Oliver, Milo, Gabriel, Isaac and the rest of the gang. I love seeing Yarden get excited as the playmat gets expanded with foam tiles, the safety gate comes down, and the vacuum comes out, She knows that something fun is afoot and then she crawls around greeting everyone as the house fills with kids.

She's actually rolled and crawled for the first time in classes, so the synapses are definitely on fire.

And if she does hold onto her first friends, I'll have photos of the first time she sat on James, had a slap fight with Oliver, or had her head bitten by Isaac.
Yarden and Ricardo are buddies from swimclass, so they are friends on land and water.

Yarden and Oliver's first slapfight.

Yarden & Oliver's 2nd slapfight.

Yarden, Elise, and James playing baby soccer.

The kids are great - of course - and so are the moms!

One of the best things about being a mom (other than the obvious)...is that you meet other awesome women with very similar lives. I think I've got this on my mind because we are about to open the doors to Hell's Kitchen and two of my OTB friends will be dining with us tonight. Betsy - our teacher - is celebrating her birthday, and Abby and her husband will be going out for their first date since Gabriel was born.

In honor of the OTB gang, here are some photos of this week's class...

Yarden clapping along to "Wheels on the Bus". She's in GLEE.
This week she wouldn't do any of the other movements,
but once the clapping between verses started, she was all over it.
Tired from all that clapping, Yarden passed out for about 45 minutes.

And then woke up groggy with the play mat imprinted in her face.
After everyone left, she was fully alert & ready to play!

UPDATE:
Betsy celebrated her birthday at Hell's Kitchen, and her entire party went home hungry. :(
But they had fun, she looked great in her green dress and had a TV moment that just might make the cut.

I'm hoping that Abby and her husband enjoyed their filets.