Swim Blessings

Finally, I get to tell you about our swimming lessons. These lessons are almost a month old now though and Grant is now in his second week of lessons for the summer and he is doing FANTASTIC!!!

You may be wondering about my title here....Swim Blessings.....Well, this is Grant's way of saying Swimming lessons.....funny isn't it? You never know how a child's mind is going to interpret something that is new to them....it gets even funnier as you'll see later in my story.

I found a great deal for my boys. Mrs. Pam Owens taught Garrett last year and we liked her so much that when I got ready to sign my boys up for lessons this year....there was no question about who we would call. Well, Mrs. Pam teaches at Mrs. Carla Colvin's pool. Mrs. Carla Colvin happens to be Garrett's PE teacher at school and he loves her. So Mrs. Carla taught Garrett at the same time that Mrs. Pam was teaching Grant. It worked out GREAT!!!

Garrett knows how to swim and is a really good swimmer. I wanted him to have lessons just to gain more knowledge of different strokes and just so he felt really confident in the water....as you'll see from his photos, he does NOT lack for confidence...lol....

Once Mrs. Carla realized that he was such a good swimmer she let him work on his "dives."
Here is his run and dive move.....sorry for the blurriness....didn't realize until too late that my camera was not set on action.....His absolute FAVORITE jump of all is showcased here.......wanna guess? Come on, he is a little boy.....the CANNONBALL of course!!!! I'm not really sure how he pulled off this jump.....some kind of flip but he thought it was super cool and so did I!!!

Ok.....let's turn our attention to my little one. Now he is not afraid of the water so to speak. I dump huge cups of water on their heads int he bathtub when I wash their hair and have been doing that since before he was a year old so he is used to water in his face. However, what he is NOT used to is putting his face IN the water. Especially such a HUGE body of water as a pool. He was NOT at all sure he wanted anything to do with "Swim Blessings." However he took an instant liking to Mrs. Pam and did not hesitate to go with her into the water. The first thing she told him to do was put eyes in and hold breath....it was the quickest eyes in ever as he did it for like half a second! Barely time to snap this photo!!!!
After she got him used to this, he got pretty good at it. Jumping in the pool was a different story....When she told him he was going to go jump off the diving board, this is what we got....
But you know what? He did it.....now there was plenty of screaming and crying but he did it....and you wanna know why Mrs. Pam is such a great swimming teacher? This is the photo I got after he jumped.....

Grant really does LOVE her and he trusts her which I know has alot to do with the fact that by the end of the week he was doing this.....

YES!!!!! He was swimming!!!! He didn't realize it but that is what he was doing. I was so thrilled!! This week we have been taking a whole other week of lessons with Mrs. Pam and he has advanced so much that he can swim halfway across the pool before he has to come up for a breath and he is reaching and pulling REALLY great with his arms and kicking with his feet!!!

And now.....the rest of the story.....lol.....OK....when someone says Swimming lessons we all know exactly what is being said....however, Grant had not heard the term before or didn't remember for last year when we took Garrett and so was not familiar with the term. His little brain did not hear Swimming lessons......it heard Swim Blessings......I didn't think that much about it until yesterday when we pulled up at the pool. As I was getting out of the car, I heard him saying swim blessings, swim blessings over and over to himself....by the time I got to the back to get him out of his car seat, this is what I heard......"God is great...God is good....." LOL!!!! That is the blessing we say at home before we eat our meals....He was saying a swim blessing!!!! I thought I was gonna die laughing and who knows? Maybe he was so scared he felt the need to say a blessing before his lesson....lol.....!!!!!! Kids say the darndest things don't they?

Busy

This is such a busy time of year for us. When it turns warm outside and ballgames start we aren't here all that much and I don't get to update as often as I'd like to.


Just wanted to share with you a few pics that might clue you in to what we have been doing lately. This is one of our outdoor activities.....everytime I look at this picture my heart skips a beat...notice that all four wheels are off the ground....he is six!!!! His favorite thing to do is try to see how hight he can go over this little hill.....if he is jumping his four wheeler at six...what is he going to be doing at sixteen?

Here is how Grant entertains himself at Garrett's ballgames....lol....These glasses are Ryleigh's(she is our friend's little girl and like a sister to my boys)....he loves her pink glasses!!! When it gets warm and the sun is shining.....we are usually at the swimming pool....Garrett has turned into such a good swimmer and at swimming lessons this year Grant made such great progress.....I'll blog on our lessons soon...(I hope!!)

I'll leave you with this photo....I laugh everytime I look at it because this is Grant's "Puss In Boots Face".....he looks just like the cat on Shrek when he wants something and isn't getting his way....when he does this I've taken to calling him Puss!!!!

I hope that you are having great summer!!!! I have Garrett's last ballgame photos and our swimming lessons photos to share but I"ll have to save that for another day!!!

Sign Of The Times

Oh boy. You can definitely tell that the youth of today have been slowly, but surely submerged into the coffee culture. When I was a little girl people didn't drink coffee that much. Where I was from only older people drank coffee. I clearly remember staying with my Nanny(my maternal grandmother) and getting to drink coffee milk. Which was alot of milk with a little coffee with sugar in it. That is one of my very favorite childhood memories. Well, today.....EVERYONE drinks coffee. I had to tell you about this little incident because it just made me shake my head in disbelief......

Garrett, my six year old, has been drinking "Coffee Milk" every morning since he was 15 months old. This mixture consists of a huge cup of vanilla soy milk, a tiny teaspoon or so of coffee and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. He LOVES it and it is one of those things that I will always associate with my boy. Anyway, yesterday morning he came up to me and said,

"Mom, I'm ready for my coffee milk."

Ok....I'll get it for you.....

"Oh, but Mom, wait....I want chocolate coffee milk."

WHAT? .....I said, "Chocolate coffee milk?" Like I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing because in the five years that I have been fixing this for him, chocolate coffee milk has NEVER been a request.....

He calmly sighed and said with the utmost patience as if he couldn't believe that I was so uninformed he said simply......"Yes, Mom.....chocolate coffee milk....don't you know that is a Mocha?"

Ah, yes, sweet boy....you are right....it is a mocha.....I just had no clue that you knew that....

So in disbelief I fixed my big boy his "MOCHA" and the scrapbooker in me couldn't help but grab the camera and snap a photo to remember this little story of how my six year old schooled me on the finer art of coffee drinking.