The girls are on a year-round team so they are constantly in the pool, but during the summer we also always join a local summer team so they can have a little more fun swimming with friends and attending weekly meets. It's less serious and more about just having fun.
This summer it was finally Sam's turn to join the team too. Oh, man, he's such a cutie in his little swim jammers. He even tried to convince me to buy him a little speedo, but I think he can wait on that one!
We're only able to go to 1 practice a week with the summer team since the girls' other team practices at the same time. So he hasn't gotten much practice - maybe 4 or 5 total. But he's steadily making progress so we decided to let him swim in his first meet this last Wednesday. It was pretty funny!
Here he's waiting for his turn to swim with his good friends, Jenny and Jessie!
And then Isabella sat down with him to give him some last minute advice!
Here he's all lined up ready to race! Luckily he was in the second heat. The first heat is always the fastest swimmers in this league. And there's always fewer boy swimmers than girl swimmers, so in his heat, he only had to race one other little boy. They were equally matched - neither could really swim the whole length of the pool on their own! But Sam took off confidently with a giant belly flop into the pool! He finished pretty far ahead of the other little boy so he walked away with a first place blue ribbon. I cannot even describe how excited he was. He showed EVERYONE! The next morning he casually told me, "Well, now I can be in the Olympics." Love the confidence, Sam!
Summer swimming will be over in another couple of weeks. It's kept us busy for sure! We don't have a pool in our small town, so we drive about 30 minutes to our summer team. Normally, our year-round team practices in another town about 35 minutes away, but in the summer, in order to practice in a 50 meter pool, we drive to a pool that is 55 minutes away. I have no idea why there aren't more 50 meter pools around here! And we have to be there by 8am. So many early mornings!! We actually get up earlier in the summer than we do during the school year!
I figured up the other day that I spend about 11 hours a week driving the kids to their practices and meet. I spend another 12 1/2 hours while they practice and 3-4 hours at their weekly meet. It keeps us busy, but they have most afternoons and evenings free to just be kids! And we all love it!
