Role Play

Riley is pretty into the whole role playing thing. She has taken to cooking for us which involves actually putting her play food in the warming drawer of my oven. So now we always need to double check that before baking anything. Someday we might actually have charbroiled cardboard for dinner...or melted plastic peas. She has also realized she can open the refrigerator so we often find a baby's bottle mixed in with Chris' Black Butte.

Right now Riley is taking ISR Swim Lessons. For those who aren't familiar with these they are pretty serious and may sound a little intense for a two year old. They are every day for 10 minutes per day and we have to document everything Riley does in terms of sleeping, the potty and eating. She is not allowed to have any apple or apple products or pineapple during the period of her lessons. No, we aren't doing this in an effort to develop the next Michael Phelps. It is more about safety in a state where most people have pools and we hear more about drownings that anyone should.

While Riley does her lesson there is usually another child waiting by the poolside for his/her lesson which will immediately follow Riley's. These lessons do teach Riley to swim, but more than that they teach her to float and how to alternate between float and swim should she ever fall into a pool when we are not right there. Last night in the bathtub Riley demonstrated these lessons with her toy walrus and penguin. Penguin went from swim to float and then Riley told the penguin to have quiet feet (which is what the teacher tells Riley) and meanwhile, Walrus was sitting on the side waiting for his lesson. Role play is awesome b/c I really see Riley understands it. The swim lessons are intimidating and Riley cried for the first 3 days last week (which is hard on mom) but by Friday she was jumping off the top step of the pool and swimming to the teacher. Watching her reenact it with her toys in the bathtub was so cute.