30 Days of Gratitude: Days 10 and 11

Yesterday, I was grateful that Natalie was able to get a little better time for her 50 yard freestyle (35.11 sec--still a BB time). She swam the 50 yard backstroke for the first time competitively since joining Quad A, and she was amazing with a BB time of 39.47 sec. At that time, I didn't know what would happen during the swim meet today--more on that later.

Alex spent the night at his friend's house on Friday, so Patrick picked him up Saturday afternoon. We are glad that the kids' grades are available online so we're able to keep up with how they're doing. All of the kids did very well on their 9 week report card (even Eric), but since then, Alex's grades have dropped a bit. He had something like a 65 for one grade and a 75 on another. He has an 88 in two classes. We are grateful that he does relatively well in school, but he seems to only want to do the bare minimum and his dropping grades are concerning. So, because of that, we didn't allow him to go to the movies with his friends yesterday evening. He was not happy, but hopefully he'll understand in the end.

I took all of these pictures today. The first one is of Natalie at the start of the 50 yard backstroke this morning. Usually Natalie would not have been able to swim that event yesterday at the B meet and then again today at the C meet, but because of her coach's slight error she was able to swim that event on both days. Thank you to Coach Tanya for that mistake, because Natalie swam even faster today. She dropped one and a half seconds from her time yesterday for a time of 37.74 seconds (A time)! She knew exactly what she needed to do to improve her time today. One of the dads told Patrick that Natalie looked confident and looked good.

This is a photo of Natalie with Coach Tanya today on deck. This natatorium is set up differently and I wasn't allowed to be down on deck with her, so this is as close as I could get. Natalie also got a B time on the 50 yard breaststroke (50.24 seconds) and a BB time on the 200 yard IM (3:16.61). It's ironic that her coach is doing such a great job of teaching her and that will only result in Natalie leaving her "team" and moving up into someone else's team.

One more thing about Natalie--she came up to me looking a little upset during this morning's warmup. Apparently, the suction cups on her favorite pair of goggles came off or something where they weren't seating correctly. She has spare goggles, but she didn't feel like they were as comfortable. She wears goggles daily, and I felt like a good pair that she was comfortable with would not only help her confidence in her races today, but also be worth the price because of how much she uses them. Luckily, they had a pair on sale there that she was super happy with. I don't know for sure if that helped her do so well today, but it sure didn't hurt. Meanwhile, I also bought her a cool quick-drying towel they were also selling there. It was red, her favorite color, and she was all smiles after that.

I feel like I'm rambling today, but I have to tell one more story about Eric. His teacher told Patrick during their parent-teacher conference that Eric is very close to reading. He has been trying to read "popcorn words" (short words like "the") and he has also been asking how to spell certain phrases so he can write them down, like "Christopher's friend" or "Which one is a T-Rex". This morning, Patrick saw Eric playing "Hangman" by himself. I guess they play this at school, and his brothers weren't up to play with him yet. I guess Eric was pretending to guess the different letters and included some wrong ones. He was up to drawing in the legs of the hangman. The word was "t_e". Patrick suggested that he try the letter "h" as the middle letter. Eric acted surprised and said, "Oh! That fits!" How cute is that? We're definitely grateful that Eric likes reading and writing so much. It won't be long before he's actually reading books.

Tonight, we were actually able to go out to eat as a family. I definitely have to be grateful for that!