One of the best lessons I learned about parenting came from a puppy training class I took several years before I ever had children: “a tired puppy is a well-behaved puppy.” This lesson has become a tenet for me as I’ve raised three high-energy children. My kids are at their best when they’ve gotten plenty of exercise.
They’ve all been in sports since they were toddlers, back when sports meant “$40 per session to stand around a gym, hoping they’ll participate in Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” My husband owns a swim club where he runs lessons and a kids’ team, so we had our kids swimming laps by preschool. We put them in a track and field program in the summer. I gently nudged them all toward soccer, because even though I never played it and didn’t know much about the game myself, it’s clearly the runningest of all the team sports.
All this to say, we are a sports family. I love sports! I loved playing them as a kid, I love watching them now, and I’m glad my kids are active and making friends with other active kids. It’s good for them.
Then last year, my daughter found her passion: cartwheels. She wanted to do a cartwheel. Passionately. I signed her up for a beginner’s gymnastics class, and before long, she could do a pretty good cartwheel. Mission accomplished!
But she loved all of it, not just the cartwheels. The class had also introduced her to the beam, the uneven bars, the vault, and a group of other older girls who could do handsprings and backflips like they were experiencing life on a different plane of gravity than the rest of us. She wanted in.
So I signed her up for the gymnastics team. And now we are in deep.