week ending july 19, 2009:

Week ending July 19, 2009: A busy week! This week the kids did stay at VBS without me and Casey and I went out to dinner!
Ever since we got back from the OBX Chloe has been practicing her “swimming” (dog paddle). She can actually cross the whole pool without assistance, but up until this week has been afraid to put her face in the water. Then Alex decided he was going to put his mask and snorkel on and he tried swimming in the shallow end. Without the added work of trying to keep his head above water he was able to swim quite easily. He was so pleased with himself that he talked about it non-stop to anyone who would listen including the neighbors. The next day both kids wanted to go to the pool again. This time Chloe put on her mask and snorkel. I don’t think I’ve ever actually got her to put on goggles before because she seemed to panicky as soon as the goggles got near her eyes, but now that her brother was doing it, she was determined! She spent a few minutes acclimating with the goggles and then took off swimming. Then some of her older friends from the neighborhood were doing hand stands and somersaults in the shallow end and Chloe took off her mask and tried those too! My little girl who two days ago was afraid to put her face in the water was suddenly doing underwater tricks without even holding her nose. I decided to push my luck and see if she wanted to jump off the side of the pool without me catching her and she did that too. She was just unstoppable. I’ve created a video and uploaded it to You Tube. Click on the triangle of the picture below:
Also this week we went to the butterfly gardens at Brookside in Wheaton pictured here: http://picasaweb.google.com/constance.phelps/ButterflyGarden2009# I bought an identification guide featuring over 100 types of butterflies from the gift shop and the kids helped me catalog the butterflies in our photos.
And finally, this week we took the kids fishing for the first time this year. We boated 7 fish, 5 spot, 1 croaker, and 1 white perch. The kids wanted to keep some fish for eating, so we kept the 3 biggest. I took some pictures and video, but I haven’t even downloaded them yet. Maybe next week.