Summertime

Normally when I think of summer vacation I think of sleeping in, swimming, lots of time to do whatever we want.

....That is my ideal summer....this is my reality

Caroline is on the swim team--which practices for 1 hour every day from 8:30-9:30. Then she has swim meets on Thursdays from 4:30-8:30 (I was smart and found a babysitter for Carter and Alex for the swim meets--too long, too crowded for them and me).

We also had tennis camp...So, for one week, Carter is in tennis camp while Caroline is at her swim team practice. Alex and Aaron and I sit and watch both of them.

At 9:30 we swap and Caroline has tennis practice.
Then Carter and Alex and Aaron and I sit and watch.
Sometimes we go to the playground for some of the time
It is a long 2 hours.

Then I decided that we needed more time at the pool so I signed Alex and Carter up for swim lessons with Coach Andy (the head coach of the swim team). Their first lesson was less than successful. Carter did great. Alex, not so much. In 15 minutes he managed to do nothing more than scream so loud that the entire pool could hear him. After the very painfully long 15 minutes were over Alex came and sat by Aaron and I. He was so upset and I felt bad for pushing him into swimming--then I felt worse because Alex started throwing up. Luckily he was out of the pool and wrapped in a towel. So I just collected all the throw up in his towel, gave him a new towel and we waited for the other kids to finish swimming....it was so bad that I couldn't think of anything to make it better--so I took a picture of the towel--at least I can get a blog post in right?

Did I mention that Alex was so sad because flies kept landing on his new frog beach towel? I tried to explain that there wasn't much we could do when it was covered in throw up...3 year-olds are not much for explanations.

Aaron is such a great baby

Realizing that maybe Alex wasn't ready for swim lessons I decided to switch and give Caroline a few extra lessons to help her with her technique. Despite our less than stellar start, the swim lessons have been terrific--Caroline is doing amazingly well in swim team, and, in only 5 lessons, Carter has improved from not being willing to even think about putting his face underwater to swimming underwater, doing a basic crawl stroke, breathing to the side, and even attempting to float at the last lesson! It has taken me years to get him to like being in the pool after something happened at swim lessons when he was 3--so for him to show so much progress so quickly is amazing.