A fabulous end to the swim season

This morning was swim championships.  My kids are not the team's best swimmers.  They aren't even really competitive.  I was beginning to wish we weren't even participating, especially since we had to be out the door by 6:30.  I am so grateful that we did though.  Robert showed some improvement, and Thomas's improvement was amazing!  In one race he cut 20 seconds off his best time, and in another he won his heat against five other swimmers!  To see the joy and feeling of accomplishment on his face...there just aren't words.  In fact, he finished well ahead of others in his winning heat and I loved when he looked back and saw that everyone else was still swimming, and he had cut 11 seconds off that time.  I had a few tears in my eyes seeing him be that happy and feel that sense of accomplishment.

Catherine also had an accomplishment, but she's just in a "mood".  She swam the 100IM for the first time ever.  I wasn't even sure she knew what order to swim in, but she did.  The parents were kind of joking that swim championships didn't seem to be the place to make such a debut, and we were just happy that she swam in the correct order and finished.  She swam so cleanly in fact, that she didn't get DQ'd.  Quite a few did...so many in fact that Catherine is the alternate for the finals tomorrow.  You can't imagine our shock!  She wasn't very pleased about it as I had made arrangements for she and Thomas to stay with my mom tomorrow evening because Robert is an alternative for the relay team for his age group.  She wants to go to my mom's and tried announcing that she wasn't going swimming tomorrow.  I've explained that I'll ask Mom to reschedule, and she started to feel better.  We chose not to explain to her that with the DQ's only 13 swimmers had recorded times, and she was #13.

I hadn't really planned to be involved in the finals tomorrow, and there is still a chance that we'll have to go and no one will actually swim.  Regardless, I'm proud of how strongly the kids finished the season!