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Community Corner

Mom On The Run Slows Her Roll for Summer Swim League

Getting involved with the kids and their swimming is a chance to model good behavior.

My 11-year-old and his 8-year-old sister swim for the Owen Brown Barracudas. An alarming portion of their practices occur at 8 a.m., Monday through Friday. They have meets on Saturday mornings that start even earlier.

Our short treks to the pool are not as soul-crushing as getting up at 5 a.m. to leave at 6 a.m. to get to work at 7:30 a.m. Still, I can see why our 13-year-old complains about escorting them to practice at the neighborhood pool.

But the teen is in Florida with my parents, and I am two weeks into four weeks of leave.

This is the longest I've been home with the kids except for when I was giving birth or having an organ removed.

For the moment, I'm too sick to run away to work or immerse myself in a home improvement project. But I am well enough to drive kids around.

I didn't swim or do team sports as a kid. I hated my brother and sister's swim meets. They were noisy, overheated affairs where I knew no one and got bitten by bugs.

I signed my sons up for swim team two seasons ago because the practices were a summer activity they could walk to while their father and I were at work. We mostly skipped meets, since neither child seemed interested, and I recalled hating them so.

That changed in the next season. The middle kid's interest in swimming survived my ignorance and neglect, and his sister decided to join in. They had friends on the team and they wanted to go to meets.

As I discovered, they wanted me to be involved, too. Not just cheering on the sidelines, but helping them line up on time for events.

I don't remember liking it very much when my parents got involved in my activities when I was a kid, so I guess it just never occurred to me that my kids might feel differently.

This kind of revelation of the obvious is something I call a Muppet Labs Discovery. The nice people at Muppet Labs really did me a favor by clueing me in to the fact that, duh, my kids actually benefit from my participation in their lives.

They need me to model how they're supposed to interact with the adults who run the swim practices and meets. And they actually like having me around.

What's more, I like the swim meets now. I see all my parent friends, and I like getting wet hugs from my swimmers. I just bring bug spray.

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