Diving Board

I forgot to talk about this yesterday but it will probably end up long anyway as I have a tendency of over informing! :)

There are two female lifegaurds at our pool that have taken to our kids especially Olivia (one of them (Lauren) looks like she could be Liv's older sister...last year Lauren brought in some photos of herself at Liv's age & we were all amazed at how much they looked alike). Anyway (see I told over informing), last summer they worked really hard with Olivia, one-on-one, to get her to go off the diving board (with a life jacket on & them in the pool catching her) because she was afraid of it...this totally blows my mind that she's afraid because she really isn't afraid of much - she's the child that asked me at 3yrs. old when she could start rock climbing! So now that it's a year later we are having to start back at square one with her. Lauren starts with her just jumping in the deep end, which isn't as big of a deal as that crazy diving board. Yesterday, the girls got her to finally go off the board but only once. Once kids accomplish this feat there is always lots of cheering and hoopla from those that are witness to it (Liv was one of a few to tackle this feat yesterday).

Bella was in the baby pool while this was taking place and heard all the cheers as well as doing some cheering for them and must have been inspired. She turns to me and says I want to do it too. I was shocked & nervous but said ok. So I suited her up in a life jacket and took her over to Lauren. Lauren walked her to the end of the board and lowered her in...at this point she was like this is not big deal until she was in the water. The life jacket that I put on her made her float right to her back and it scared her because she was stuck. Bail was in waiting for her so she scooped her up and brought her to me. I had no idea that that jacket would do that...oops. In the back of my head I have the saying "if you fall off the horse you've gotta get back on" so I say let's try it again with a different one, and she wanted nothing to do with that. Bad mom that I am, I force her into a different jacket (she's crying & fighting me but I do win as always :)) and get in the shallower water with her so she can see that that jacket works better for her. Later in the day when she's back in the kiddie pool w/o the life jacket she says, "I want to do it again mom". To which I reply, "let's wait until tomorrow because Lauren went home". Hopefully she'll try it again!

*Gosh it's a good thing I didn't post this lengthy word spew yesterday...that post would have taken up the whole page!

**Bail & Nico had their first swim meet tonight vs. Wilson's. I will let you know the results tomorrow, but they did very well...I was very proud!!!

***Liv was able to have her last game tonight and from what I hear she did a great job and she said she had fun! She also got her medal tonight! --Thanks Catons for helping us out tonight!!!!