More swimming news

As we suspected Zoë had quite a few ribbons waiting for her at Fun Friday this morning. Uncle Patrick asked if she had robbed the ribbon giver—but, no! These ribbons were all hard-earned!

Early this afternoon Benjamin opened his birthday presents (more on that later), but we also got fun packages for most of the other kids that I felt kind of bad giving to them, considering we're technically celebrating Benjamin...but there the packages were nonetheless. 

Alexander got his owl towel:

And then Zoë got a new pair of (knock-off) crocs and the Shutterfly book I had been working on also came, which Phoebe was excited about. And Rachel got her check from the education fund Grandma set up for her years ago. So it was an excellent delivery day for us!

I took the boys back to the pool in the afternoon to help them with a few things (Andrew took Zoë and Miriam to a music lesson and Rachel stayed home to work on Benjamin's cake). Benjamin is helping coach Junior Barracudas and he needed some help figuring out how to support writhing toddler bodies in the pool as they're learning to do things like float on their back and put their faces in the water. 

Here he is helping Phoebe get her balance for a back float:

And here she is floating all by herself (she did really well today):

As promised, I helped Alexander on his turns. We focused just on an open turn today—approaching the wall fast, grabbing the deck, planting his feet, and pushing off underwater into a powerful glide. He was doing pretty well at the end and told me, "Yeah, I can see how that would be faster than whatever I was doing yesterday."

There's still time to work on the flip part of the flip turn he so desperately wants to achieve, but I figure a solid open turn is an improvement over...whatever he was doing yesterday!