swim team

We signed Seth up for swim team this summer- eight weeks of one hour practices five days per week. Technically, he was on the "pre-swim" team. This meant that practices were basically large group lessons and we didn't have to go to swim meets if we didn't want to.

My hope was that having Seth in the pool for 5 hours per week would turn him into this totally awesome swimmer. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that all those hours in the pool actually helped to improve his strokes. The time that Jon spent with him one-on-one was way more beneficial. But he really liked being on the swim team and he now has a sweet tan.

After hearing about swim meets from other swimmers, he asked me when he was going to get to swim in one. So we all went to the last home meet of the season a few weeks ago. He swam in two events, one relay and one race- both 25m freestyle. Below is a video of the second race, he swam against the only other 6 year old boy at the meet. You can see at the end of the video the guy who was timing him was motioning him to hurry up (I think he got tired towards the end of the race). His official time was 48.67 seconds.

The meet eventually got rained out, which we were kind of glad about (who knew swim meets were so long!).

For her fourth birthday, Maryn wanted to have a princess ballerina fairy party.  I pretty much followed the same plan as last year's party- invited a few little girls, played some games, made a craft, decorated cupcakes and went on a treasure hunt (this was new this year, I think- Jon put a great one together for the girls).  I'll post pictures soon (when I get around to getting them off my camera) but for now- Jon has put together two video segments of the party festivities. There are two or three more segments coming soon.

"let's start the fun!"

We had a fun visit in early June from Grandma B, Papa and Rach. Here is a link to the web album of pictures from the trip.  (I've also included a ton of links in this post so that if any of you want to visit us too- you can see all the fun stuff we can do together!)

We did a lot of fun things around town. Starting off the first week with Grandma, we went to the farmers' market and both local public libraries. Grandma knew all the fun kids books to check out and we came home with about 30 books from each library. The kids really enjoyed listening to all of them, especially the Robert Munsch and SkippyJon Jones books.

When Papa and Rach came, we all went to the Childrens' Discovery Museum in nearby Normal (not a joke), which was totally awesome- the coolest childrens' museum I've been to. Three floors of all types of hands-on exhibits including a huge train table city (Jonas's favorite), a fake food grocery store with a check-out lane (Maryn's favorite), climbing maze (Seth's favorite) and painting on plexiglass which we all enjoyed.
We also went and saw Up- great movie, went to our awesome local pool complex (with water slides), ate custard, played Guitar Hero and Tetris, spent time playing ball outside, got Mom hooked on FNL, ate lunch at the Flattop, visited the Amish.... We're thinking next time we might make the trip to Chicago or St Louis for some more fun activities.
Ice cream in very rainy Arthur.

Lunch at the Flattop- sooo yummy!

It was a great trip and we were all sad to see them go. Seth got very emotional when they had to leave and spent the next few days tearily talking about how he wished they lived here in IL with us. Luckily, we plan to spend Christmas in AZ- so we'll see them again soon.

Thanks for the great trip!