June this and that

I hit up the major weekend events in June, but I thought I'd write down a few of the little things that happened day to day.

Swim Lessons: I taught 4 straight weeks of swim lessons in June, and the kids also had 4 straight weeks of taking lessons. Tyler and Bryce are looking really good in the water. They were introduced to the Butterfly and Breaststroke, which are two very difficult strokes. Their front crawl looks really good, and rotary breathing (breathing to the side) is looking better all the time. Bryce has an impressive backstroke, he favors it over the front crawl, but it still lacks power. When Tyler is pushed a little, he has a powerful front crawl and can really attack the water. Both spent a lot of time diving, treading water for over 2 minutes, and even worked on a few flip turns in the lap pool. I wish I would have been able to watch them more. That's the only disadvantage to having them take lessons while I teach, is I really don't get to see them in the water and don't know exactly how they are doing. They were advanced to level 5 at the end of June. I will need to spend some time working with them on technical parts of their strokes before I think they're ready for level 5, but it's still pretty impressive. It's way farther than I ever got!
Lexi advanced from preschool lessons to level 3 with the big kids. She was the littlest in her class both sessions and she typically blew her instructors away with what she can do. Both times they came up to me and asked, "what do you want me to do with her, she already knows everything?" She's working on rotary breathing, dolphin kicking, and back strokes. Her Elementary backstroke looks beautiful! She can tread water for over a minute, and can successfully do sitting, kneeling, and standing dives. As a swim instructor at the Y, I'm one of the only ones who can ribbon test. If the lifeguards were super busy, then I'd test the kids before swimming real quick and one day we just told Lexi to see how far she could swim. She swam the entire length of the pool (25 yds) and earned her green ribbon! Having a green ribbon gives her access to the entire pool by herself. Given that she can't touch in more than 75% of the water in our pool, she had to have special rules from Mommy that were different than the Y's. This led to some struggles for the first few days because she just couldn't resist going over to the diving board, which is her very favorite thing to do. I actually feel more comfortable with her in the deep end, vs the recreation pool because she usually just jumps off the diving board and swims back to shore. With the rec pool, she can get stuck in the middle where she just can't touch, and tires really quickly. She's something else to watch. She was advanced to level 4 at the end of the summer. Once again, I'll probably have to spend some time with her one on one before I'll put her in the class, but pretty stinking amazing for a 4 year old!!

We had fun with the summer movie program at a local theatre, Northern Lights. I got ticket passes for $5 each that got us into 8 weeks of movies (could pick 1 day a week to watch the movie that was playing that week). Most were older movies that we've seen, but there were a few newer releases like "Hotel Transylvania" that we hadn't. The kids loved going to the theatre and looked forward to it every week.

We also participated in Summer Reading Program through the library. The kids each read for 20 minutes a day to earn prizes at the library. The boys were even nice enough to read to Lexi much of the time. They've enjoyed "Magic Tree House", "The Witches", "Captain Underpants" (which I can't stand), "The BFG", and much more that I can't remember right now. Often, they'd read longer than the 20 minutes because they were enjoying the books so much and that always thrills my heart. I want them to love reading as much as I do, it's fun to watch them get so into a good book.

We got into a good groove with our schedule. The kids actually got along pretty well. They all enjoyed playing legos upstairs together, they let me have rest time and didn't bother me if I was in my room. I'd definitely count it as a successful first month of summer :)