Father's Day 2013

Words cannot fully describe the extent of my man's devotion, integrity, and Godly leadership as a father to our children, so I'll just praise our Heavenly Father for sending him to us. (Gift #628)

We had the privilege of traveling to my hometown on Father's Day to celebrate my dad's birthday and Father's Day with my family.  I am so thankful for my devoted father and for all the amazing fathers in my life who are setting positive examples for the next generation of what a real man should be.  (Gift #629)

Swimming Firsts

Teaching our kids to swim has always been a challenge.  Our first house (as a married couple with a kid) did not have a pool nearby, but we learned about a very good swim instructor who lived about 20 minutes away and taught lessons at her private pool.  So, we signed our daughter up for lessons with her, but by the time lesson began, we had moved to a new house almost an hour from this swim instructor's house.  It was tough for a parent to sit in the sweltering heat behind the pool (we were not allowed inside during the lesson) for over an hour during these sticky hot lessons.

Swim lessons with Mrs. Ann (June 2008)

The new house on the golf course had a pool and tennis club, but the fees were high for a such a rinky-dink pool with no lifeguards or swim team.   Plus, after our first year there, we put our house on the market (and we had it on the market every year for the next five years), so we did not want to pay the membership fee if we were about to move.  So we did not join the pool, but we did drive 45-60 minutes each way to get the kids five to ten swim lessons each year.  I'm not sure how valuable those lessons were, however, since we did not have regular access to a pool where they could practice those skills.

Our apartment last year had indoor and outdoor pools, so our kids did get to play in the water more, but there was no formal swimming instruction or lap swimming.   Our third house, which we are in now, does not have a pool in the community, but there is a fabulous private pool less than a mile away if you drive (or closer if you take the greenway by foot or bike) with a fabulous swim team, lots of swim instructors, tennis, playground, etc.  We decided to jump at our first chance to join a pool and the swim team.

Our new pool in April the day we joined

I have never been on a swim team, and I am not skilled in all the strokes, so I had no idea what to expect with swim team.  After the new parent orientation, I was so overwhelmed by the time commitment that we made our daughter choose between gymnastics team or swim team this summer (she chose swim team), and I pulled her out of some of the meets since they can last over 8 hours on days she has camps or we have other family commitments.  

I have recently learned that our little swim team (139 swimmers) is ranked #5 out of about 50 in the southern league, division 2, which is one of the best leagues in the state with Olympic swimmers coming out of this league.

Considering that our daughter has never belonged to a pool and has only had a week of lessons each year for approximately five years, I knew joining a team filled with year round swimmers who have been competing for the past five years would be a big challenge.  I assured her that my only goals for her were to make sure she was drown-proof and to strengthen her stamina, so she should not stress about her rankings on the team. 

She had never even learned to do the butterfly and only had one short instruction on the breast stroke before signing up for this team.  Mostly her lessons have been on pool safety, treading, freestyle, and  back stroke.

Her times for each event at the timed trials were terrible as we expected (and as were the times of all the other new team members), but I was just impressed that she could do the new strokes properly all the way across the pool.   She asked me to pull her out of the butterfly at the first meet because she just wasn't ready.  Most of the practices were cancelled the previous week due to thunderstorms, so she really just needed more time to learn the stroke and practice.

I really struggled at the timed trials as I tried to figure out my volunteer role as a "kid pusher" while not knowing anyone except for one gal from college who had left the faith to marry an atheist causing some awkwardness between us, thought I desire to rekindle that friendship.  While she watched me make so many goofy mistakes at those trials as I learned everything the hard way, looking and feeling clueless, she was probably too embarrassed to acknowledge that she knows me.  Her kids are experienced, fast swimmers.

My daughter began making lots of new friends (Gift #623), however, and seemed to enjoy everything about the time trials except for the fact that she did not win. She is very competitive and expects too much of herself.

Things really turned around for both us at the first meet, a home meet against one of the top teams in the league.  Even though she was swimming against some of the best swimmers in the state who had many years of year-round competitive swimming experience, she won her heat and came in 5th overall in the breast stroke out of 18 swimmers in her age group.  She did not do as well in the other strokes, but she improved her time on all of them compared to the time trials.  Even better, she insisted on getting put back in the butterfly event (which a few days ago she had insisted that I pull her out of because she was not ready) and came in 12th, which is a higher place than she got in freestyle or backstroke.  I love to watch her face challenges like she did with the beam in gymnastics and now with the butterfly in swimming.  Her faith in God helps her overcome her fears and her weaknesses! (Gift #624)

All this to say, she was up against some tough competition and having had no real swimming experience and only a few lessons here and there, she did awesome.  And she was even asked to fill in on the relay at the end of the meet, an event usually reserved for the faster swimmers.

By the first meet, I had mostly figured out what I was supposed to do as a volunteer kid pusher, and I met a really nice family whose daughter was in the same age group as our daughter.  They are new, too, so we are learning together.  Then I realized their daughter is one our daughter's closest friends. I'm meeting more people and feeling less like a fish out of water.  The meets are long, but they are rather fun though the 97 degree heat (heat index around 105) was difficult to endure for that long period of time.

The second meet of the season was an away meet against an exceptional team.  Our team got stomped.  It was not pretty.  It rained at the beginning of the meet, so my son and I sat under my umbrella trying to cheer her on while praying it would not thunder causing a rain delay, but the rain soon passed without any meet delays (Gift #625).

We were shocked to learn that our daughter had been selected to swim a lap in the initial relays.  She swam her one great stroke, the breaststroke.  She beat her PR in every event except the freestyle.  She and I both keep building friendships, which in my opinion, is the most important part of being on a swim team.  Both of our kids invited several friends from the pool to church and to Super Summer Adventure (VBS) this week, so I love the way they are using this pool time to reach others for Christ (Gift #626).

Our girl always gets a fast start.  Our son is taking swim lessons from Josh, the tallest coach pictured above.

I am very impressed with this swim club. It's run mostly by high school students, but the number of  social activities, the creative theme nights (the picture above shows the coaches dressed for "Neon Night"), the Big Shark/Little Shark mentoring program, the professional quality photography taken and published on line after every meet, the tech savvy heat sheets and record keeping for every swimmer tracking up to 1/100th of a second improvement, the logistics of organizing a hundred volunteers at every meet, etc. are all outstanding.  They pull it all off without a hitch yet in an easy going manner that makes it all fun without all the stress that could go with it (Gift #627).

Meet Muffin

Losing Bun-Bun was hard on the family after we had made so many sacrifices for him and gone through so many changes with him.  He was our steady source of amusement (and frustration) through it all, and we loved him so.  But we knew we needed to fill the void in our hearts with a new bunny, and the breeder just happened to have a large batch of pedigreed Holland Lop (my favorite breed) bunnies weaned and ready for placement in loving homes.

So, we studied her ads and learned all about the bunnies' lineages.  Her recent litters had been 3/4 male, and we wanted a female after having so many complications with our last alpha male bunny, so those pickings were much slimmer.  The first four bunnies the kids picked out were all male, but when they saw this cream female, they fell in love.  She was described as as "rare cream color with while underbelly, very sweet and soft, and likes to be pet."  Well, we certainly wanted a sweet one that liked to be held after all the shenanigans Cody pulled.  She was the most expensive one in the lot, but she would save us a $300+ neutering bill, so she was a bargain in my book.

This broken orange fuzzy caught the kids' attention, but that fuzz would require a lot of grooming, and we had loved so Cody's silky soft fur.  Besides, this one is technically Cody's niece, so she could be mischievous like he was.  She certainly has "trouble" written on her face. 

 

So we made plans to pick up the cream bunny the following week the day after we returned from Great Wolf Lodge.  Meanwhile the kids debated names for the bunny and could not agree.  Our daughter insisted we name her Buttercup while our son and other members of the family thought Honey-Bun was more apropos.   The kids argued over a name all weekend.

Then at 10:30 p.m. the night we returned from our trip, the breeder called to say the cream bunny was sick and would not be available for a few more weeks.  These bunnies were already over 10 weeks old, and we did not want to wait, nor did we want to risk getting a sickly bunny, so the breeder suggested we meet the other females to make sure there aren't any others the kids might like.  The kids were so disappointed and were ready to wait.  

However, after delivering a sympathy gift to a long time friend from my Michelin days in Alabama and South Carolina who just happened to be two miles from our house that day (note to self :  keep praying for Eric and his family over that tragedy), we met the breeder's mom at a Walgreens parking lot, which is much closer to our home than the rabbitry is, so we could look at the other female bunnies just in case the kids saw another one they liked.   She had another bunny for sale from the same litter which she had not yet advertised because she was smaller than the rest, and she tries to sell the larger ones first since people tend to gravitate toward the smaller ones.   I have always liked the coloring of sable point bunnies, and this new runt bunny was a sable point, but I was more drawn to the white broken magpie who had been described as "sweet and friendly".  The sable point came with no description, so her personality was unknown to us, but she was a sister of the sweet white magpie, so maybe she would be sweet, too?  It didn't matter.  Both of my kids immediately picked the sable point. There was no doubt in their mind which bunny was meant to the theirs.  That they both agreed is miracle #1, and that they agreed instantly is miracle #2.  They also immediately picked out the same name for this bunny.  This bunny would be named Muffin.  That agreement is miracle #3, so indeed this bunny was meant to be ours.  So after raiding the ATM and buying things at Walgreens to get enough cash to pay for Muffin (sable points are rare, and thus very costly), we brought her home on June 3.

When we received Muffin's pedigree sheet, I discovered more reasons why she was meant to be ours.  While her parents are a magpie and a frosted pearl, her grandparents are some variation of orange and sable point and a broken black like our Cody. The broken black was named "Oreo" just like I had called Cody before the kids renamed him "Cody" only to later be nicknamed "Bun-Bun" by their dad.  Better yet, her great-grandfather was an orange bunny (like my childhood rabbit) named "Mr. Peaches". My childhood bunny, who lived to be seven years with inadequate care and nutrition compared to what breeders recommend today, was named Peaches.  Here are the only photos I could procure from the internet of Muffin's family.

Most of the bunnies we looked at during our bunny selection were sisters.

Her Mom and Dad

Muffin transitioned easily to our new home while some of her siblings were so stressed out by the new environment that they had to go to the pet emergency room.

 

When introducing a baby bunny into a new home, the first two days are critical for the bunny's health as the bunny must adapt to the stress of so many changes at once (new environment, new caregivers, and long term separation from the mama bunny and all the other siblings the bunny snuggled with 24/7 before placement into the new home). So, our daughter loaned her stuffed panda to the new bunny, and she snuggled up right against it as if it was her broken black sister she left this morning when she came to live with us. That stuffed panda bear is such a comfort to our new pet.

 

We've discovered that little Muffin has lots of different cute sleeping positions. Here are a just a few including the two above:

1. Cuddling beside stuffed panda with paw around panda friend
2. Cuddling around or on top of stuffed panda friend
3. Sprawled out in the litter box
4. Curled inside cage with legs and paw forward and ear back
5. Sprawled out with paws under chin
6. Pull plastic off cage until it forms a hideaway tent and sleep with head under "tent", belly down with feet out behind her    

I'll admit that at first I was not drawn to her as I did not think she was nearly as cute and cuddly as Cody.  And I still liked the white bunny who looked more like Cody. But wow, has she grown on me.  I think I'm more attached to that bunny that anyone, and my husband sure seems smitten too.

Like Cody, she loves the exercise room and claimed it as her own personal bunny playground.  Of course, she also really likes the family room for all the hiding places, the living room for the wide open spaces for high speed jumping, and the dining room where she likes to freak me out by threatening to pee on my nice new white, costly rug. Oddly, this bunny does not have pale yellow urine like Cody. Hers is bright orange (the breeder said all her lineage has orange urine too and that the vet said it was fine) which could do some serious damage to nice rugs, so we're limiting her play areas now.

One of the reasons she is easy to love is that she is absolutely hilarious to watch as she has been exploring our home.  I think I'm partial to bunnies because of the way they move..be it the low belly crawl, regular hop, giant leaps, aerial stunts like the 360, wheelie, or binkie, or the sled slide across hardwood floors. See Muffin demonstrate many of these movements and misjudge the distance and slam into the coffee table as she explores her new digs in this video.

She was just as entertaining to watch as she explored the exercise room for the first time.  Muffin does a nice binkie and ventures "through the looking glass" in this video.

Most amusing of all was when she discovered our Roomba vacuum cleaner.  She ran and hopped on top of it with such force that her paws pressed the start button.  As the Roomba played her "Get ready, I'm about to move" song, Muffin's eyes lit up.  She seemed to enjoy spinning around and taking a ride on top of Martha. (Martha is the name we gave our Roomba so she can vacuum while I act more like Mary.)  See glimpses of Muffin meeting Martha in the following video.

It's hard to tell from most of my pictures just how tiny she is, so we tried to measure her at 11 weeks old.  She was 1 pound, 11 oz.  While curled up in seating position she was about 6.5" long, but when she's spread out, she's between 8" and 11" long.  Or, you could say she's three apple diameters long.   I placed her on the counter in front of a cutting board that is only 12"x 15" for perspective.  Some day, she may be as big as the cutting board.