In addition to all the usual activities and visits with family, July also involved another round of swimming lessons and our church’s Vacation Bible School program.

This session of swimming has been fantastic. Advantage of going to a lovely, small Y: Lion has a private lesson for the cost of a class because she’s the only one who signed up for her age and skill level, and Bug also had mostly private lessons because the one other child in her level switched to a different time slot. Even Monkey's class only had three kids! The extra time and attention clearly paid off: All three girls made obvious progress, and they were each promoted to the next level at the end! This session, Bug was thrilled to be in a class in the big pool for the first time: she swam laps, learned to use the diving blocks, and played wet ball (it resembles water polo). Monkey repeated the same level, because she didn’t think she had the endurance to swim real laps yet. She does now! (This time around she was clearly the best swimmer in her class, which gave her an extra boost of confidence. She’s always been our most hesitant swimmer, so this is a big deal.) Lion's swimming skills took off as well. Like her sisters, she was working on front and back stroke and was introduced to breast and side stroke. This time around she discovered the perks of having a teenage boy for an instructor: things like splashing contests and getting flung into the pool.

Swimming lessons here even involve some boat safety time.

The girls loved their first vacation Bible school experience! This church does VBS in the evenings, feeds the kids dinner, and draws in significantly more kids than are actually members of our little church. The girls were thrilled to get to hang out with their friends, do crafts, learn new songs, and listen to Bible stories every night last week. I volunteered in the kitchen and had a great time getting to know some of the other ladies at church. In the meantime, the girls had a blast getting an extra 45 minutes on the playground while we prepped dinner.