Riley wants to swim too

If you ask Kyra who her best friends are, she'll say Grace, Colleen and Sophia. She's been begging to visit Colleen ever since she learned that Colleen's family has a new puppy. Plus she just really misses her. She's used to hanging out with Colleen year round ever since the summer before 2nd grade; in school and then at the pool during the summer. Colleen's family were members of our pool until recently when her parents decided to change pool memberships to their neighborhood pool, a few miles away from our house. After over a week of trying to find a good day for Kyra to go to their house, we settled on Colleen coming over to our house today instead. We picked Colleen up after Kyra's swim team practice, so Kyra could meet their new Rottweiler puppy, Bruce. He's so CUTE!!! He's much smaller than I expected, but then again, he's only 7 (or is it 9) weeks old. After petting the puppy for a few minutes, we went home and packed a lunch and my laptop, and then went to the pool. I reviewed a report for work while the girls swam. There were only a few other people at the pool, so they had it mostly to themselves. Kyra has a big imagination and they pretended (at I'm sure Kyra's suggestion) that they were sisters when another girl arrived. I wondered, why be sisters when you can be best buddies? We left the pool shortly after 1:30 because I had a conference call at 2 p.m. that I needed to do from home, rather than the pool. While I was on my conference call, the girls built a clubhouse under the deck using pieces of wood that were piled there when we bought the house. They worked on it until it began thundering and lightening. Kyra begged me to let Colleen spend the night and go to the swim meet with us, but that just wasn't an option. I told her no, but told her we would invite her to spend the night some other day in the future. It's complicated, but I kept it simple. I told her that I have to go to work early tomorrow and it would be better to plan an overnighter on a weekend. But Colleen is going to the beach for a week and then I'm going to camp for two weeks, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!! It was tough to say no, but I had to.

I packed our stuff, wrote Kyra's name on her right shoulder and "Fly Girl" on her left shoulder with a blue sharpie, sent the dogs outside and then took Colleen home. I had hoped to talk to Colleen's mom at some point today, but they have company from Denmark that was surrounding her at pick up and drop off. That conversation will just have to wait.

After dropping Colleen off we drove to Flowers Crossing subdivision for the 2nd swim meet of the season. Kyra was scheduled for the freestyle, 100 yard individual medley, butterfly, medley relay (butterfly), and freestyle relay. Kyra freaked out when she learned that she had to do the 100 yard IM. She claimed she didn't know how and that she had never done it. But on the heat sheet, a time of 2:04 was listed for her previous best time in that event so obviously, she swam it at least once last year. But regardless, she went straight to her coach to claim she didn't know how to make the turns. Her coach talked her through it and reassured her. Coach Mary said that none of the girls in her age group want to do the 100 yard IM so she decided to alternate who swam that event each meet, and this week was Kyra's turn. Although she was worried about it, she came in 2nd place in her heat, improving her time by 15-20 seconds. Way to go! She also took a few tenths off her freestyle and butterfly times from last week. I'm so proud of you Kyra! The team that we swam against tonight was larger and had more year-round swimmers than our team and the team we swam against last week. I'm sure we lost this meet, but at least Kyra made improvements on her times. Kyra's step-mom came to the meet for about an hour. At first, Kyra was following me around while I was busy coordinating timers, but then I told her she needed to hang out with her step-mom since she came all the way to the meet to see her. After I finished taking care of what I needed to, I stood with the two of them and made polite conversation so she wouldn't feel so out-of-place. She watched Kyra swim the medley relay and the freestyle, but then had to leave to pick up her daughter, Kyra's step-sister, from vacation bible school.

While we were driving home I mentioned to Kyra that I wondered how the dogs were doing since I haven't left them both out at night before. We arrived home around 10:30 p.m. I opened the upper basement door to let the dogs in and then went straight to the bathroom. Kyra walked into the bathroom and said, "Mom, you have to look at Riley's arm, NOW!" Oh boy... Riley just had to be like the rest of the kids and draw on his arm while we were away at the swim meet. Too bad we can't make out what event/heat/lane he was supposed to swim in. He even insisted on using the same blue ink that Kyra chose for me to write her name and "FLY GIRL" on her shoulders before we left the house. How funny...