All day with the six of us

Noah and Molly at their first ever swim meet

We had a fantastic Saturday. It started very early (Noah had to be at swim meet warm-up at 6:30am!) but it was fun. This is the first year any of our kids have done summer swim team; Noah and Molly are signed up through the city league and they both really like it. They have 45-minute practices four mornings a week (Noah at 7:15, Molly at 8:00) and weekly meets. Fortunately for me and my beauty sleep, today was the only early-morning meet. But as much as I enjoy sleeping in, I also enjoy having something to get us all up out of bed in the morning and help provide some structure to our carefree, school-less days. Today's meet was all freestyle; Noah's age did 50-meter and Molly's did 25-meter. They both swam their best and were proud of themselves; it will be fun to watch them improve over the summer.

After both meets were over the kids had their last-of-this-year regular swimming lesson, with the teacher who we discovered last year. She is great and the kids have each learned so much from her; their previous experience had mostly been the city swim classes which they hardly made any progress in, when they were younger. Aubrie does smaller classes but they are still very reasonably priced, and she has a bubbly personality that is great for working with kids. Parents get to sit in on the last lesson so it was fun to see all the kids' skills this morning.

So remember how we took this trip and we weren't sure of the future with the boat? Well last weekend Aaron spent quite a bit of time on it, diagnosing, testing, evaluating, and hypothesizing (okay so I'm getting carried away here) and it looked like whatever's wrong with it was most likely not too bad. Fixable! The true test was taking her to the lake, which we set out to do today as soon as all the swim meets and smimming lessons were over.

This is the only picture I took at the lake. Naturally, Noah thought those broken, found-on-the-boat sunglasses were hilarious.

Well, um, it looks like the boat's still kinda broken. It was running okay but starting having the same problem it was having before, so we had to forego any extra driving around (like for kneeboarding and tubing). We found a shady spot at the lake to eat our lunch and swim, which was all we did. It was still fun, despite the boat issues... and despite the fact that a bunch of water from the cooler leaked into the tupperware full of sandwiches I'd brought, rendering 5 out of 6 of them inedible, and that I didn't have enough of the "right kind" of granola bars, and the bananas were bruised and the raisens were stale, and I forgot to purchase a boat sticker for our lake pass so we worried about getting a ticket, and there was quite a bit of floating debris (small sticks and the like) where we were hanging out and swimming...

We stayed about 2 1/2 hours and boy are my kids easily amused; all a mom has to do is pretend she's a stick floating in the water, pleading with all the boats around to not run her over. They laughed and laughed. They also were amused that I knew so many of the words to Play That Funky Music White Boy, which was being blasted by a nearby boat. Good times.

On the way home from the lake, at about 5:30, it occurred to me that the six of us had spent the entire day together, the whole time. We watched Noah's & Molly's swim meets all together (and they got to hang out with us until their heat), then we watched their swimming lessons together, and we were of course all together at the lake. Most of our Saturdays are spent on chores, preparing church lessons, etc. and we'll typically do something together like a family swim but it's not often that we spend the whole day all together like we did today. It was great! My kids are so fun, and so funny, and Aaron is such a great dad; I really did enjoy myself and I do love being with all of them. Not to be sappy, but it's true. So, there you have it... pretty much the reason I call it "Happy Life."