June Album

The last half of June can be summed up in four words: swim, run, read, screens. Monday through Thursday were swim team days, with practice early in the morning and one or two meets in the evenings. Monday through Friday were summer practice for the cross country team. Jay and Rose joined in for a portion of the cross country practice after 80 minutes of swimming. They ran for 20-40 minutes with the team most days. Buff kids! 

During Rose's first run at cross country practice, she got a painful side stitch and had to walk a lot, and felt pretty frustrated. That night during family prayer, Jay prayed for Rose not to get any more cramps while running. My coach-brain thoughts said "That's a nice thing for Jay to say in his prayer. Rose will eventually stop getting side cramps when her core gets stronger, her running form improves, and she gets used to the motion of running. So I guess this prayer will eventually be answered." But Rose hasn't had a side stitch since! Time for me to dig up some extra humility and faith.

Reading and screen time were our activities of choice when we were home recovering from all of the swimming and running. This summer we reinstituted our 50/50 screen time earning plan for the kids. They have to earn their daily screen time with equal time spent outside. Swim practice earns Amber 90 minutes of screen time, and Jay and Rose 2 hours (since their practice is longer). Every mile they run earns them 30 minutes of screen time. They also have the option to bike--every 15 minutes of biking earns half an hour of screen time--but they haven't had much interest or energy for biking after all the swimming and running. Most days, swim practice and cross country practice earn them enough screen time for a king, but sometimes they still add on to it with more outside time.

Secondary June-featured words include: garden, Father's Day, ping pong, chores, and trails. 

We planted our garden LATE this year, on June 27th. I purchased six seedlings from Walmart (I never claimed to be a fancy gardener), and Amber helped me put them in the ground. We planted two cherry tomato plants, two regular tomatoes, one basil, and one watermelon. I made sure to arrange the plants within the sweep of the yard sprinklers to aid with watering. I also set up our soaker hose to supplement the weekly deep-soak that our sprinklers provide. Hopefully this year we get some tomatoes!

We celebrated Father's Day a week late this year, on June 26th, since I was out of town visiting my parents on the calendar Father's Day. We gave Jeff gifts and he somehow managed to perform his annual triple-kid-lift, even with a sore back (he tweaked his lower back while moving heavy high jump pads at the track a few weeks previously). We love Jeff!

Remembering to have the kids do household chores like clean the bathroom is hard in the summertime, but it always happens eventually. Having a ping pong table on our front porch has been pretty fun. We have to keep two old dish rags out there to wipe the thin layer of dust that always accumulates on horizontal surfaces outdoors in our area. We taught the kids how to play around the world ping pong and had a fun family game night. The kids are still working on hitting the ping pong ball in the right direction, so we gave everyone three strikes before they got out during around the world ping pong. To keep track of the strikes, we spelled the word PIG, just like the basketball shooting game. So we played PIG pong! 

I have been dying to get out on the many gorgeous trails in this big beautiful state, and we finally made it happen this week. [separate post]

Amber with her summer reading boxed set of Wings of Fire books. She has only read a chapter or two of book 2 ever since she finished the first book several weeks ago, but she reads lots of picture books every day so the reading is still happening.

On Fridays, without swim team practice to wear her out, Rose runs farther. On Friday, June 17th, she ran 3.5 miles with me! That's 2.5 miles farther than I ever ran as an 11 year old!

After cross country practice. This was taken before the summer heat hit--see the diffused light from the cool cloud cover? Hard to believe that this was only 2 weeks ago. The Yakima Valley heat didn't hit until the third week of June this year--about a month later than usual.

All ready for the first home swim meet and Amber's first ever swim meet!

Kids in swim caps are my FAVORITE.

Amber, "on deck" waiting for her first ever swim race: the 50 meter freestyle. She was absolutely adorable, belly flopping off the blocks and churning through with impressive arm rotation for a few strokes before coming up for air. She stopped swimming, treaded water while taking a few breaths, and then started swimming again. She did this every few strokes for the entire 50 meters, and finished in 4th or 5th place in the age 8 and under race with a time of 1:51. 

Holding her time card: each lane has three timers, and they circle the middle time for each swimmer. Amber was happy with her race, which was a relief because she is super competitive and usually isn't happy unless she wins outright. Before the meet, we talked a lot about how you win every time you get your own personal best time, and hopefully that helped.

I brought a donut for each kid to eat when they finished all of their races. Donuts inspire SO MUCH JOY in my children. Providing donuts every now and then gets me the easiest mom points I ever score.

Another day, another cross country practice. Amber stole my phone and took this grainy ultra-zoomed in picture from the car. Her swim practice ended at the same time as cross country practice, and before it got hot, she would go wait for us in the car to keep warm. I found several Amb-shenanigans on my phone...

Amber in the driver's seat, living her best life. Her bike is on the rack on the back of the car in this picture because on Fridays Amber biked with the team while we ran, since she doesn't have swim practice.

Selfie central! These pictures cracked me up when I found them on my phone later.

On Saturday, June 25th, we went to the tri cities to watch the four Gibbons cousins ride in a BMX race. We waited in the loud crowd and scorching heat for over an hour and a half to see them ride their 30 second races, but when they were finally pedaling around the hairpin banked turns, it was so exciting to cheer them on!

The traditional Father's Day triple-kid lift!

Front porch ping pong--gets kind of sweaty in the heat, but our porch is the biggest room in our house, so that's where the ping pong table goes! Haha.

Rose was taking pictures of our ping pong match and made sure to document the difficulty of fishing a lost ping pong ball out of the flower bed.

Our landlord's yard guy/foreman Juan randomly deposited two massive rocks into the corners of our garden, and Amber joyfully used an old toothbrush and a cup of water to clean/polish/scrub the rock.

The garden is planted! We did it in our workout clothes after cross country and swim practice since I hate sweating in normal clothes. Amber learned how to gently hold the ball of roots and place the seedling in the ground. She's such a lively soul that it always surprises me and warms my heart whenever she shows her gentle side.

The plants are in a triangular formation to catch the sweep of the yard sprinklers. We need two more tomato cages, but I'm such a lazy gardener it probably won't happen, haha.

Rose has been working on her chopsticks skills and can now eat a bowl of Ramen with chopsticks.

One of introverted Jay's favorite places to read quietly is underneath the bed. One of Amber's favorite activities is to FIND Jay and invade his space. (That blur on the right is Amber swooping in.)

Amber, peeling a sweet potato for some healthy Superhero Muffins that we made together last week. 

Amber really wanted to buy some Pokemon cards, but she was 60 cents short, so I gave her a job. She earned a dollar by cleaning out our shoe bin that we keep by the front door. The bottom third of it was a disgusting layer of dry grass, dirt, old socks, and mangy old gloves. Amber meticulously cleaned it out, discarded the gross stuff, and organized the shoes. Then she swept up the sifted debris. It was definitely worth the dollar I paid her; I've been haunted by the grossness of the shoe bin for far too long.

Rose the swimmer! At this week's meet (June 30th), she did five races: the medley relay, the freestyle relay, backstroke, freestyle, and butterfly. She was neck and neck with another girl in the back stroke and got second. She bravely attempted the difficult 50 meter butterfly (Jeff was the stroke judge and he had to disqualify her for too many kicks per stroke). She got a 50 meter freestyle PR of 50 seconds flat. And her freestyle relay team dominated! Rose is very graceful in the water, and I love watching her swim with my eyeball pressed up against the chain link pool enclosure.

A little bit of Amber being dramatic--I took pictures because it was so funny, she was almost like a cartoon character with her deep sighs and body flops. I can't remember what injustice she was working through, but she was super cute while she did!

Head flop, curl splay. Jeff and I were laughing.

Later, Jeff played a Ninja Turtles video game with Amber. I'm not sure who had more fun.