Kaia had two more class credits to use up before the summer was up with Little Maestros music class. I wouldn’t have found this task so annoying if it weren’t for the fact that Little Maestros primarily has classes on weekdays. Only during the summer for about 2.5 months do they have two options for a Saturday class, but both sessions, at 10am and 11am, are on the East Side of Central Park by 79th Street, so it’s not the most convenient area for us to get to. Granted, it takes about 25 minutes to walk through the park to get there, but when you’re pushing a stroller, sometimes as you’d imagine, it can be a bit longer.

So I thought it would be fun to consolidate and do one music class session there, and use the second class credit with my friends and their daughter, who is about 8 months younger than Kaia and recently celebrated her birthday. So this was kind of like her belated birthday “experience” gift. We could make it into a music class/day at the park/lunch outing, and so we ended up doing that.

It was really cute seeing Kaia in the music class today. It’s one of the only music classes she’s attended where she could walk, so of course, she was running around everywhere, whether it was up to the performers while they were singing, around other families (with far less mobile babies), and even out of the class area to the walking path, where other park goers were just wandering around. Of course, she knew she was being cheeky and giggling every time I ran after her. When she was running around, I realized looking around at the class (it was actually quite a large group, and in most cases, couples came with their baby or babies, and even friends and grandparents came) that she was probably one of the older children there because she was the only one who was running around. Most of the other babies looked so young that they were unlikely to even be crawling yet.

But what I found the funniest and cutest about the time Kaia had with my friend’s 1-year old today was that I told Kaia that she had to share her Little Maestros instruments with her friend. And as soon as Kaia saw the friend take one of the instruments, she immediately started taking all the other toys and shoving them into the box, then put the box behind her back away from the friend. Kaia then put her hands over the box, as though to shield it from anyone else touching it. And I insisted to Kaia that she had to take turns and that the toys were for both of them today, not just her. Eventually, she was okay with “turn taking,” but it took a little coaxing for her to ease up her grip on the toys that she wasn’t even playing much with. Talk about toddler possessiveness!

Even though Kaia will always be my baby and I will always look at her like she’s a baby, today’s class made me realize even more exactly how much she has grown and matured. She really is a true toddler now and not really a baby anymore. She’s also expressing herself more and more and asserting her wants, likes, and dislikes constantly, and I’m just trying to keep up with all of it and not let her turn into an entitled brat. With the “turn taking” today, I cannot even imagine what she’d be like with a little sibling!!