Baby Circus

The kid likes to hang on stuff and swing. Bike staples, stair rails, pretty much any low hanging bar that she can get a grip on. As an Involved Parent™, the first thing I think of any time she does anything more than once is “How can I channel that!”

A rare moment.

So the obvious thing to do is to find a way to help nurture this, like using a trapeze. In my imagination, she would hang from the trapeze bars and swing to her heart’s content, smiling at me while I bathe in the radiant glow of being a Good Parent™!  So, we signed her up for Baby Circus a few months ago.

Let me tell you, she loves everything about it! She loves the songs they sing and games they play while exercising. She loves the stunts. She loves the little obstacle course they have. She loves the trampoline. She loves the teachers. She loves everything.

Everything, that is, except the trapeze.

About halfway into the class, they let the trapeze down. They are set up to be anywhere from 3-4 feet off of the heavily padded ground. All of the other kids and parents race off to grab one of them and start practicing. Cleo will sometimes very casually mosey over to one, grab it, hang from it for a second, and then, despite dad’s manic encouragement, she’ll  wander off. Sometimes she won’t even go for a trapeze bar and will somehow skip right to wandering off. At first the irony of the whole situation was amusing.

This dad!  This is the
thing I don't like!

Now, however, it’s become a chess match.

You see, I've learned that if I try to pressure the kid into trying out the trapeze, this is a guaranteed way to get her to have absolutely no interest, and picking her up and putting her on a trapeze results in a kicking and screaming, yelling “No!” kind of situation.  What I have noticed is that if I pretend I’m not interested, she sometimes, SOMETIMES  will go back to the trapeze independently.  This is, in my book, a Huge Win™.

She’s  a pretty perceptive kid so I can’t half ass this. I have to let go of my resentment and really sell my interest. Oh, what’s that?  The ladder that the janitor uses and accidentally left out? Oh sure! Nothing I’d like more than to pay $20 an hour to have you sit under a ladder like you could do at home rather than using the unique item that only this place has that, have I mentioned, allows them to charge us $20 an hour? Yup. Fuck those things. It’s ladder time!

Despite her disdain for the trapeze, she does love the damn class. It’s undeniable. Throughout the rest of the week I’ll hear her playing by herself in her room, happily singing the songs from it. Maybe she’ll grab that bar one day, maybe she won’t. As long as she smiles and sings, I suppose it’s worth it. Besides, what with Cirque du Soleil, who’s to say what’s a circus worthy prop anyway?