My Water Babies and a Couple of Links.

Okay, I have a funny link that I think you'll enjoy, or at the very least will generate some discussion. But before I get to that I want to do a quick re-cap of the week, because a couple of kids have hit some milestones. Sort of.

Braden - Braden may well be on the way to conquering his fear of the starting blocks. He has no problem entering the pool from the side, but has been terrified to try to go off the diving board. He knows it's kind of an unreasonable fear, but until now has been content to live with it.

But this week saw the arrival of his first "Splash" magazine from the Swimming Association. It explained the structure of swimming competitions, the four strokes, etc. He was intrigued by the idea of international competition. This led to lots of discussion about competition, setting goals, hard work, etc. He decided that his first goal on his way to internationl competition is to learn how to dive. His second goal will be to learn how to do the breaststroke and butterfly.

Not a huge milestone, this, but he is not a natural goal-setter or fear-conqueror, so this is a good step forward for him!

Brogan - On Monday we went to the homeschool swim in a nearby town. We drove for 30 minutes to play at a fun zero-depth pool. It had slides, and floating things to climb on, and sprinklers spraying kids at random. Brogan, in a desperate attempt to show me he's mature enough for swimming lessons of his own, jumped in from the side of the pool and went completely underwater...... and came up sputtering, but smiling. He discovered that he liked jumping into the pool and going under. And so he did that for much of the time we were at the pool.

By the end of the swim time he'd learned:
a) Jumping in is fun!!!
b) Before you jump, you should close your mouth. It's hard not to swallow water when you forget to close your mouth because you're smiling.
c) It's okay to close your eyes too.

This is one boy who'll likely be getting swim lessons for his birthday.

Colson- At swim time Colson learned that he can slide down the very realistic-looking giant dragon slide and not be eaten.

Also, today we ventured from the house twice without a diaper. He kept his big boy undies dry the entire time! Woo-hoo! I'm sensing freedom from diapers very soon!

Okay, now for the fun link. I came across this link yesterday while searching through the Ramblin' Educat's archives.


(Above photo is from Sally and Johnny's site.)

I thought the page was very witty and well done. Don't miss the "Your Letters" and "Your Testimonials" pages. I loved the comments that were sent in. So many people found so many ways of looking at this! And the Testimonials page proved that there are many funny people out there in cyber-space.