There are times that Caroline manages to surprise me - I guess that's not entirely hard to do when parenting a 4.5 year old, but you know what I mean. Keep in mind that this is the same kid with whom I had NATO-level debates with last week over her lack of faith in me that her arm floaties *would so* hold her up - I made her friend Erin put them on just to show Caroline how it worked!
So today after swim lessons, the instructor dismissed two other little boys in a higher-level class than Caroline and her friends and said that they could go down the "big slide" if they wanted to. Caroline said "hey, I want to go down the slide too!" The swim teacher and I had a silent mental conversation with each other about whether or not we thought she would really do it, but Caroline said she promised to go down the slide if Miss Lindsey was there to catch her. I walked her over to the slide, and reminded her that the slide into the pool was definitely smaller than the slides at the playground, so she could totally do it. She climbed to the top and after some encouraging yells from Miss Lindsey and me, she actually WENT! Of course, as a parent one of those key moments of awareness in your brain happens in the .0018 of a second that you realize "that's my baby shooting out over four feet of open space to splash down in the pool!" And my facial expression pretty much matched Caroline's when she shot out the end of the slide - looks like :-0 !!!! However, once the spluttering and spitting stopped, Caroline laughed and said it was great and she would absolutely do it again. That's my adventurous girl!
