How to Win Friends and Influence People at the Little Gym

At the beginning of this year, the wife and I decided that we should get the kids involved in some developmental classes. We figured that it'd be good for them to interact with other kids and socialize a little bit.

These classes, in case you're unaware, are a somewhat new cottage industry marketing themselves to overachieving parents who are paranoid that if you fail to get your children into the right pre-pre-preschool then your dreams of Harvard are forever dashed and your children will grow horns. I could be a real cynical cocknose here and blabber on about how these businesses only exist to take money from desperate parents by preying on their fears of failure. If I took this approach, I'd point out how just about every single soul reading these words right now turned out fine growing up in the 60s, 70s, or 80s without these classes. All we needed was a healthy dose of microwaved food, Big-Wheels, television, shag carpeting, and leaded gasoline.

But I'm not going to be a cynical cocknose. It's a different time now, and the thing to do is to get your kids into one of these classes. At least that's what you tell yourself after drinking the "Keeping up with the Joneses" Kool-Aid.

Here where we live, two of the good options for childhood development are Kindermusik and The Little Gym. Regardless of whatever critical things I've already said or will say here, both of these programs are really fun for the children. Kindermusik focuses children on being musical. They obviously don't care too much about teaching children how to spell. The Little Gym is a physical activity center for kids. They get a chance to run around and play in an environment where they literally cannot injure themselves. It's a rubber room for toddlers.

Both of these classes were at approximately the same time on Saturday mornings. The wife and I decided that we should split the kids up and spend time one-on-one with them at their respective programs. We put Nolan up with the wife at Kindermusik, and Lilly and I took on The Little Gym.

Lilly loved the Little Gym. The other parents there were very nice, although they might have been nicer to me because I appeared to be a single father without my better half. Their children took a shine to Lilly too. There were about a dozen other kids in her class. She charmed everybody during the weeks of classes at the Little Gym. Parents would ask about how she was doing, and they'd smile as their children would run around and play with Lilly. She was the idyllic model of what you'd want your child to be at a social event. She played, she laughed, she'd try out new words, and at the end of every class she'd walk out the door happy holding daddy's hand as we went to the car. It was a special time that I'll always remember with my baby girl.

The reports back from Kindermusik weren't quite the same for Nolan. Keep in mind that I wasn't there, so this is second hand. It seems that Nolan was a little hit-or-miss at Kindermusik. He enjoyed the songs and the singing, and even to this day several months later, it's clear that he still remembers some of the songs and play things that they did in his classes. But Kindermusik hit at a time for Nolan where he was entering a phase.

A "phase" -- that's what we call it to make us feel better about potentially raising an antisocial maniac. This phase involves random acts of toddler violence; specifically, pushing. Nolan got it in his head right about the time Kindermusik started that walking up to children who were perfectly happy and shoving them on their bottoms was super-awesome. He was super-wrong. But you go ahead and try to explain to a 14 month old boy that his actions are frowned upon in polite company.

So Nolan's experience at Kindermusik was mixed. Sometimes he spent a good amount of class in timeout. Other times he really enjoyed himself.

(in case you were wondering, yes, that "phase" carried on right through his second birthday. It's better now, but he still sometimes thinks it's fuckin sweet to push kids over. At least now he knows he's in trouble. He'll push his sister over and then immediately look around to see if we saw him. He's wearing an ass groove in his time-out chair. At some point we might have to confront the potential fact that Nolan could be a budding version of Biff Tannen).

Back to the story. Towards the end of the kids "semesters" at their classes, we had situations where there were no Kindermusik classes on particular Saturdays. I can't remember why that was, it just was. So we called up the folks at the Little Gym and asked them if we could bring Lilly's twin brother along for a Saturday class. Lilly, as you remember, was adored by all at the Little Gym, so of course they were happy to have her twin brother come along! After all, what could possibly go wrong with having another sweet child at the Little Gym class?

Suckers.

The class started out decently enough. This is a relative statement. The kids got through the door of the classroom without incident. But shortly after the kids got there, Nolan locked on to a young boy, went right up to him, and form tackled him. I don't think he was trying to hurt him or anything, he just felt like it was awesome to tackle him. That's how the class started. So I apologized to the mother of the child who my son just assaulted and then hovered over him while he played to help protect the general welfare of the other kids. This went on for about thirty minutes or so.

During the course of a normal Little Gym class, the instructor will bring out various bells, balls, inflatable toys or bubbles to keep the kids entertained. One of the gold standard winners for the Little Gym is a large rectangular bouncing thingy. It inflates to a height of about two or three feet and had raised sides so the kids don't fall off of it. Running down the middle of this rectangle are raised "bumps" that extend to sitting height for a toddler above the main "floor" level of the rectangle. All the kids climb on board the deflated rectangle and then the instructor inflates it. The kids flippin love this thing. So when the bouncy thing is inflated, the kids will jump and bounce and play and laugh! Sometimes they fall down, but that's because they lose their balance or accidentally bump into another kid.

The downside of this bouncy thingy is that the parents can't necessarily get to the middle of it to snatch their kids up if they get out of line. I think Nolan realized this early on. After realizing that this bouncy thing was an open invitation to be wild, he pushed over another kid. Given the circumstances, this probably wasn't the worst thing in the world. It was a bouncy surface and the kid wasn't hurt. I saw the child's parents and they were laughing. So it was all fun.

The boy Nolan tackled at the beginning of class saw this happen too. He didn't think it was funny. This boy, who was smaller than Nolan, ran around one of the raised "squares" on the bouncy thingy and launched himself into Nolan's midsection! I shit you not, this kid speared my son Bill Goldberg style. He landed right on top of Nolan and pinned him to the mat of the bouncy thing as if he was there to enforce order for the rest of the Little Gym class against the tyranny this newbie was bringing to his town. This boy, again, who was smaller than Nolan, wasn't havin' it and he let Nolan know in no uncertain terms that my son would not behave like a hooligan in their peaceful community.

At this point, I'm laughing my ass off. So are most of the parents around. The impact crater caused from these two boys landing on the bouncy caused other kids in their wake to also fall down. It was a mass of humanity. A Royal Rumble for the Little Gym. We were on the verge of queuing up the Benny Hill theme song for a truly entertaining toddler wrestling extravaganza when Nolan began kicking the boy who was on top of him. Well...let's just say that was the point where we had to step in and break it all up. It was an epic fail. But it was also about the funniest thing we have seen with the kiddos up to that point. The wife and I did everything we could to contain our laughter as we slunk out of the Little Gym early to prevent any future dustups.

In response to this, I mashed up some video cuts of Nolan into his first professional wrestling intro video sequence.

This story has been in my blog queue for a long time. It's painfully outdated, as these events took place during the spring of this year. I should clarify that Nolan isn't a holy terror. He's actually very sweet and caring. He's moodier than his sister, and when he's cranky he can be a handful. But for the most part, he's pretty damn awesome.