Swimming 101

Bayley gearing up for her second race of the day
Grandma G and Kendal hanging out between races
Sunday pictures -serious cheese
Sunday pictures...silly

As all of you know I am a huge sports fanatic. I played and participated in just about every sport imaginable growing up. Out of all of the sports I've tried, I probably struggle most with swimming and tennis. It is hard for me to admit that I am not good at something, but I am not very good at swimming or tennis, which is probably why they are some of my least favorite sports. Nonetheless, I have children that love the water and are actually pretty good swimmers. So when we moved to Alabama last year, we were excited that there was place where Bayley could swim year round. She joined the Anniston YMCA swim team and for the most part has really enjoyed it. Yesterday she had her home swim meet, her second ever meet. The last meet she participated in was last October and she had only been practicing with the swim team for about 6 weeks. She performed awesome yesterday! She swam the 25 freestyle, 50 freestyle, 25 backstroke, 25 butterfly, the 100 medley relay and 100 freestyle relay. She has really improved in the 6 months since her last swim meet. She improved on her times considerably in everything but the backstroke, which she was already pretty good at. She won 4 second places, one 12th place in the 8-under 50 freestyle, and 1 first place. She was so excited and we are so proud of our little fish.


For those of you who may be like me and unfamiliar with competitive swimming, swim meets are ALL day affairs. They spread out the swimmer's races I guess so that the y can rest in between, but that means that there are a lot of races in between that your child is not participating in. So the majority of the time at a swim meet is actually usually spent sitting inside a crowded gymnasium with all of the other swimmers and parents. You actually are only in the pool area for the time when your swimmer is swimming, which for us was in total only about 15 minutes yesterday. Grandma and Grandpa "G" came over from Marietta to cheer Bayley on. We enjoyed having them around and it was nice to have other sources of entertainment between the races besides me.


Kendal is sure that she wants to follow in her sister's footsteps and join the swim team as soon as she is 5 years old. So who knows, Saturday swim meets may become a regular occurance around here. As for now though, I think we will stick to participating in 2 a year.


The rest of our week was pretty low key, which was nice after the last week. Kendal got to ride a pony for the first time...there was travelling petting zoo with $3 pony rides.
She was so excited! Trey is definitely entering his prime of michief and trouble. He keeps me very busy and I am trying my best to limit my usage of the phrase "NO SIR" to about 20 times per day. Jeff's highlight of the week was catching his first Bass in our backyard pond. Until Friday he had only caught catfish, so he was thrilled to catch a pretty good sized small mouth bass.