Last day of swim team!

The moment Phoebe's been waiting for all summer finally arrived! She is the proud new owner of—not one but—two shiny new ribbons (with more coming tomorrow)!

It was the last day of "futures" so they had a mini meet, where each child got to swim backstroke and freestyle. Phoebe's backstroke is fairly non-existent and she struggled immensely. Her coach (Tenley) was a timer so wasn't in the water and the coach who was in her lane was—for reasons no one can figure out—trained on the other little girl swimming in that lane who is really quite confident in her backstroke. So while the coach was walking by this sweet little gal swimming along, Phoebe was back at the diving block nearly drowning. 

Now, could Phoebe have turned over at any point and started swimming on her stomach? Sure. 

Did Phoebe do that? Uhhh...no. She just flailed around on her back. 

Tenley's mom threw an absolute fit from where she was standing. "Someone get Phoebe right now!" she screamed until that poor little coach realized she was focused on the wrong swimmer. Phoebe got towed the rest of the way across the pool. 

But full points for being so dedicated to the backstroke that she was willing to drown for it...I guess.

Her freestyle event would have been a smashing success, except that the little coach was now so nervous about Phoebe in the water that she towed her across the pool for that event as well. 

Poor Tenley apologized, telling me that she told the other coach to help with backstroke and not freestyle but...somehow the message didn't get across. But that's okay. Phoebe was perfectly happy about the mini meet (including the part where she was floundering in the deep end). 

Here are the futures with their coaches:

Benjamin is smack dab in the middle with his star student. Tenley is fourth from the right (blue shirt) with Phoebe in front of her. And Bethany is just to Tenley's right (Bethany helped a lot with Phoebe as well). As kids graduated from futures we ended up with more coaches than futures, so the last few weeks Phoebe usually had two coaches to herself! 

Here's a series of silly pictures:

The prizes this year came in brown paper bags—bubbles, sunglasses, and a beach ball. Phoebe was very excited about it, but such a prize can hardly compete with The Bucket of 2024. 

Which apparently I didn't even get a picture of.

We just made Alexander get rid of it, actually, but it had had a place of honour in his bedroom since the day he brought it home. It was even too sacred to actually come to the beach with us. It just sat on his dresser or dangled from his curtain rod...always full of treasures. The handle broke off a while ago and he had just tied a piece of string in its place and kept on using it...but we finally convinced him it was time.

I was standing next to my friend Angela, whose son was in the futures program with Alexander in the great year of The Bucket and he said, "Oooh! Is it time for the kids to get their buckets?" 

"Shhh!" Angela warned through clenched teeth (trying to protect the small ears around from disappointment). "I don't know if they are doing buckets this year so just...shhhh..."

"Oh, he's still obsessed with his bucket, too?" I asked. 

"Oh, man!" Angela said. "That bucket! He was obsessed with it!"

Unfortunately, there were no buckets this year. But the kids didn't really know any better and were happy with what they got. Here's Phoebe happily popping some bubbles while we waited for Benjamin's swim practice to get over (we all had to stay for everyone's practice this morning because Andrew had to teach and Miriam had an orthodontist appointment). 

Here's Phoebe blowing some bubbles herself:

And about thirty seconds later she tipped over her bubble solution and that was the sad end of that (luckily we had more at home that we could refill her precious purple bottle with).

With our last practice of the year out of the way, we set about preparing for the afternoon swim meet (and getting a few wasp stings and things like that—important stuff) and soon found ourselves at the pool again (not our pool, but a pool).

Alexander went from not wanting to swim anything....to agreeing to swim his relays...to swimming everything but backstroke...to swimming everything including backstroke. So he really rallied. 

Between the sting relief, the ice packs, the Benadryl, and the ibuprofen he seemed to manage his pain just fine. Here he is crawling out of the pool after one of his events:

This particular pool has such a small deck that it was hard to keep track of things. Our "bull pen" was out on the parking lot, so we couldn't see what was happening at the pool. From the bull pen. 

I sat out in the parking lot with Phoebe (and helped keep track of kids—and even caught a ginormous spider that was scrambling around on the kids' stuff and making them all scream...and then I went and got one of the assistant coaches to come take care of it because catching it was as far as I could go).

One of the assistant coaches was drawing hearts and stars on kids' cheeks. Phoebe asked for a heart and it turned out beautifully (Alexander, as you can see from the pictures below, was mostly content to lounge in his chair).

Phoebe also found a couple of flowers:

Here's Phoebe killing time by balancing on some wheel stops...carting around her drink and snacks:

And here she is finishing up her 25 yard freestyle—she took 13 seconds off her time from Monday (and still came in last place to a round of applause from the entire pool deck)!

Here's Zoë with her medley team:

Who even knows what Benjamin was up to! He couldn't be found for one of his relays and I was sent to chase him down, but he had just been helping with the younger relays before hopping into his own line (so that was good). Honestly, most of my time the first part of swim meets has been spent making sure Phoebe and Alexander are where they should be...and then I've worked the second half (which is when I can really watch Benjamin and Zoë...except that I can't take pictures because I'm working the meet). 

They all swam well, though! Late, late into the night. The team we went up against only has a five-lane pool and they are a huge team so everything had several heats and we still had poor little six- and seven-year-olds up on the diving blocks at 10:00 at night! It was long night!

Here's a picture of Zoë swimming, though—I did catch a few of the big kids' earlier events!

And here's Benjamin about to dive in:

It was a good swim season!

Tomorrow's our last "Fun Friday" and then we...wait to see if any of the kids make it to the county team!