At the pool

Last night I took the girls back to the Y indoor pool for the first of six swimming lessons. They both loved it! They are much fonder of swimming than soccer, that's for certain! Catherine is starting to swim underwater quite well for short distances. Elisabeth still flails around a bit and she's so skinny she sinks easily, but she's learning to paddle with her arms better and control her breath.

After the lesson we met one of the other moms. She struck up a conversation with the girls and Catherine started talking about how Elisabeth goes to speech therapy, and the woman told them about how she goes to physical therapy. She ended up pulling up her pants legs and showing the girls her two prosthetic lower legs and explaining how she got them (apparently some kind of terrible septicemia led to a double amputation). I thought that was really cool that she would "show and tell" all that to the girls, and it made me feel good about fundraising for the Challenged Athletes Foundation. We'll see her again next week.

I got in a quick 600 yards during their lesson and was only halfway congested last night, so there seems to be a length-of-exposure factor in my reaction to the poolwater. I'm waiting on a new shipment of noseplugs to test out to find one that doesn't hurt to wear.