Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Let the swimming lessons begin

Our visit to Maryland went well, the time there was very nice including a surprise of several dozen crabs for me to pick for dinners and a few to bring home as well. The drive is long and the boys got antsy - Dima on the way down " I wanna get out of this car!!" and Josh spitting and being bratty on the way back. Each way we had something to do other than just the straight - through drive. On the way there we went to Lancaster for Dima's therapy and on the way back we stopped in to visit a former neighbor at a cool playground that opened since we moved away.

Today we started swim lessons for this year. They were supposed to start yesterday but the state had budget issues to work out so the park was closed since non-essential workers were furloughed. We'll have an extra 15 minutes added to our lessons both Thursday and Friday this week so we'll make up the day and still have next Friday for a rain date if need be. Our contingency plan for today was to go to Whitehall to visit my Mom + Dad if the parks were still closed.

Both of my boys do pretty well with going along with their teachers and co-operating with them. Dima was splashing around a little so after the lesson I told him to knock that off so he's not disturbing the rest of the kids. At least neither of them were wailing like our little neighbor. She's terrified of the water and really just cried the whole time, though she was proud of herself that she put her head under the water when asked to. It'll take a few days for her to be happy to be there, but her mom is just tortured by listening to it.

I've got a membership to the pool so after lessons we can stay there and play in the pool and "splash park". Dima likes to get splashed in the splash park which is okay with me, as long as there aren't too many people there that it's hard for me to keep track of him. For a while today we all stuck together in the shallow end with them jumping off the pool walls to me. New Rule: When jumping they have to be sure I'm paying attention first Josh jumped once and head butted me cause I was talking to Dima at the time and didn't see him coming.

Then after playing in the splash park - which has a dozen ways to get squirted by water and valves to control the flow on some for the squirting things - Josh kept insisting that we go to deeper water for him to jump in to me and I told him I needed to stay where I could keep an eye on Dima. When Josh got out of the pool to walk over to the deeper part, that was it, I told him that since he wasn't listening to me that we were leaving. I ended up picking him up face out - cause he was spitting and trying to hit me - and sitting him on the towel for a time out. Then we got our stuff together and headed out. It was too bad cause it's really really hot out there and cause I actually had a lunch packed and had planned to stay a few hours. We left by 12:30 cause I think it's really important that he listen to me especially in that situation and I wanted to get that point across to him.

We got our act together early today so we could pick raspberries in the park before we had to be there for lessons. I like to try to be early for stuff anyway since I never know when something will come up that causes a delay in getting ready or leaving to go someplace. Dima has a little "fishing net" that he made in school before their field trip to the park that we'll have to take with us on a day that it's not 100 degrees - so we can walk to the lake and play around there.

We're scheduled for the next 2 weeks for lessons so we'll probably do pretty much what we did today each time we're there. I like to pack a lunch ahead of time then have the kids eat by 12:30, swim a little longer then get out of there before all the camps and buses of people get in for the day. Someone said that 1-3 is their busiest time so I try to get out once the crowds arrive.

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