Sunnyside Sharks 2021

Swim team was short and fun this summer. Practice was four days a week from 7:30-8:30am. Jay and Rose swam for four weeks out of the six week season. It was just enough to get them fit without burning them out completely. Jay swam in three meets, and Rose swam in two. At their last meet, they each swam six events in just over two hours. Hello, fitness-- there's nothing like swimming for an hour a day for four days a week for a whole month. It sure whipped them into shape!

The swim meets were virtual, which meant that rather than traveling to different pools, each team swam in their own pool and compared times afterwards to determine finishing places. Only having one team in our pool made the meets fly by in less than 2.5 hours! Normally meets are nearly twice that long. It is tiring to stand around watching a swim meet in 100 degree weather! I know, I know, it's even more tiring for the kids who are doing the actual swimming, but still. Us parents put a hefty amount of sweat and energy into swim team too! 

Yay USA!

Celebrations for Independence Day were extended because July 4th fell on a Sunday this year. Festivities began on Saturday morning, July 3rd, with a pancake breakfast at our friends' house. The kids played all over the yard while the adults sat in the shade and talked. It was relaxed and pleasant, and I took zero pictures. After breakfast with friends, we came home and went swimming in our next door neighbor's pool. Miracle: I got all the way into the water! I used to love swimming, but the fun has faded over the past couple of years. As I age, I seem to become less interested in processing the sensory array that comes with wearing a swimsuit and submerging into chemically clean water. Wet suit, dry skin, sunscreen/chlorine smells, watery ears, etc. All of those sensations tend to detract from my enjoyment of swimming. But it was a family activity and the kids were so excited for all five of us to swim together, so into the water I went. 

June Books

In June, I embraced the easy summer beach reading style (even more than usual, haha). I barely made it through one non-fiction book, and only two of my fiction books had much substance. (Thank you, Wendelin, for keeping some sense in my literature!) I don't have much else to say about my June reading--no epiphanies or deep thoughts. Not even any shallow thoughts. These books gave me what I needed at the time!

Junend

June has ended. Junend. We have Juned sufficiently. It was a scorcher, so pardon my clumsy wordplay. June journal clips:

Monday, June 14th: Swim team begins! This morning at 6:30 we got everyone up and at 'em for the first day of swim team. At the pool, Amber stood shivering in line waiting to take her swim test, while Jeff and I watched from the other side of the fence. Sweet Amber doggy paddled, mostly with her hands, about 2/3 of the way across the pool (short way) before touching her feet down. She stood up two other times before she made it to the other side, and she didn't make it onto the swim team. She tried again about 15 minutes later, and still couldn't quite make it across. She was pretty sad and discouraged, but we reminded her how young she is (Jay didn't join the team till he was 9, and Rose joined when she was 8). We also reminded her how far she did manage to swim, and we told her we would help her practice a lot this summer so she could make it next year.

During swim team, Jeff and I coached our first cross country summer conditioning session. Six runners showed up! 3 boys, 3 girls. It was awesome having three girls show up to run--a team record for summer training!

Escape to Paradise

Sometimes escape is the only answer. Some of our favorite adventures have been sparked by the need to escape. After college/before kids when Jeff and I were backpacking around Europe, unexpectedly crummy/unsavory hostels or extra-fragrant urine-drenched big city gutters inspired us to escape to last minute hidden gems like Perpignan in southwestern France and Vikos Gorge near the Greece/Albania border. Those unplanned escapes became some of our favorite memories of the entire three month trip. The escape phenomenon has been a recurring theme in our life ever since. We escaped dead-end jobs in Missouri and moved to Washington in 2009. We escaped the Grandview High School construction on the other side of our back fence and moved to Sunnyside in 2017. Each summer we escape the heat of the Yakima Valley in search of cool mountain air. The end of June brought the most extreme temperatures ever recorded to our valley. Escape was imminent.