Saturday, June 13, 2015

Lil' Swimmers!

I taught swim lessons and coached swim team every year between the time I was 15 till I was 20. It was such a fun part of my life. At the time, I swore I would never be one of those parents that had a 6 year old that couldn't swim. I didn't understand it at all. How could you just not teach your kids how to swim?! It didn't make any sense to me. Well, here I am. I have a 6  year old who doesn't know how to swim. Not only does she not know how to swim, but if water gets on her face... forget it. Last year I put her in swim lessons and it made her not freak out so much about water on her face, but she still didn't swim. Every time I was at the pool I would try and focus on getting Macy to swim that I didn't teach the other two how to either. So here we are- a 6 yr old, 4 yr old, a 2 yr old and not a single swimmer. I swore this was the year- the kids WERE going to learn to swim. We put them all in swim lessons and I was surprised at how well they did! I fully expected that none of my children will ever swim- but Macy is actually swimming! With her face in the water and everything! The other two are on their way, but Macy by far has made the most progress. Yay! 

I don't remember the name of Macy's teacher, but she was great. London had one of the students in Kyle's choir named Levi and Bentley had pretty much his favorite person in the world, Jedi. Jedi is the son of his nursery leader and has been his little buddy ever since. Bentley pretty much runs the show where ever he goes and not knowing how to swim didn't stop him at all from wanting to go off the diving board. The lifeguard in me kept saying this is a really bad idea, but if that was the way to go in order to get his face wet I was okay with it. Jedi jumped off the board with Bentley the first time and then Bentley wanted to go by himself, but that didn't really work out. He turned around instead.







 
I know I need to keep working on getting them more comfortable in the water. With the pool only being open 2 months out of the year it's a struggle, but hopefully by next year they will all be little swimmers.





Ballas!

I don't know about anyone else schools, but I feel like our kids come home with tons of papers all the time. Even London in her little preschool is always coming home with sign-up sheets for just about anything you can name. The girls both came home with t-ball sign-ups and with it only being $20 a kid I figured why not. We told Macy we were going to sign her up and she burst into tears. Not really the reaction we were going for. She said she didn't know how to play and didn't want to play. She was scared. We had a good talk about how just because something is new doesn't mean it bad. (I have to give myself the same talk sometimes). We basically told her that she was going to do it either way, we needed to get this girl into some new experiences. We signed up in April so I figured it would be starting here in the next month or so and just waited for a phone call from the car. In May I kind of forgot about it, but as soon as school ended I started getting worried about when this thing was actually going to start. I got a text from the girls coach that introduced herself and let us know their first (and only) practice would be the following day and they would be having a game after that. 

I still hadn't bought the girls shorts and they both needed a glove- so we took a quick trip to Show Low to go get the stuff we needed. We got home and rushed the girls to practice. On our way there Macy kept saying "But Mom. You know I don't know how to play tball right?!" I reassured her that that was what tball was all about- learning how to play. After practice I asked Macy how practice well. She hoped in the car and said 'That was really fun! But I still don't know how to play tball." :)

The next day was their first game, so Kyle went over some in and outs on how to play the game. Apparently he forgot to mention that once you hit the ball with the bat you are supposed to run, because neither girl did that. Macy finally figured it out, but even at the last game London's coach was having to push her toward first base. She sure had a cute little pose there at home plate with the bat sitting on her shoulder though. All the "rules" that Kyle went over didn't really matter anyway- tball has it's own set of rules that I had no idea about. The kids all bat in order of their jersey number- we had London with #9 and Macy at #10. Poor London always got passed up by Macy though by the time they got to home plate, when the last batter bats all the other kids just run home. The games are either 5 innings or an hour, whichever one comes first, and no kids ever get out. It makes for a pretty easy game.

Kyle kept telling people that our team was the "bad news bears"- and the only reason it's funny is because of how true it is. The other teams had all kinds of gear, baseball pants, and parents that were all into the game. Our team on the other hand had the little kids sitting in the infield and thought it was much more fun to see who could get the ball first after it was hit then to actually throw it to first base. I AM glad though that the girls had a low maintenance team and coach though, they were all just out there having fun.