Thursday photo #221

This week it has felt like the Summer holidays are well and truly underway. My husband has some time off work and we’ve been on some lovely days out. Libby is on a holiday camp for a few days and then we’ll be thinking about going away. And by the time we’re back, three weeks will have passed since they broke up. Half way to the end. Suddenly, it’s going far too quickly.

Swimming

Swimming is a big deal in our family. Building water confidence for the children, triathlons, water polo, open water swimming, we’re always doing something that involves being in the water. Since she was tiny, Libby has always been confident. She could swim at the age of three and always found her lessons really easy.

Things were a little different for Lia, simply because they had to be. For quite a long time, my husband wasn’t able to go in the water due to an injury. So, I was taking the girls swimming on my own. Lia had to wear a float because I couldn’t dedicate the one on one time to get her used to swimming without it. This meant that she wasn’t as confident or as competent as Libby.

When she turned four, Lia started swimming lessons. She was relatively confident in the water by then, but definitely a non-swimmer. Now nine weeks on, she has just been awarded her stage 1 swimming badge. She still refuses to go far from the pool wall and hates to be out of her depth. But she can swim short distances without a float or any help. She goes underwater and plays with Libby and best of all, she loves every minute of it.

Keeping busy

I suffer terribly from mum guilt during school holidays. I want the girls to make the most of their time off, so we’re always doing things. This week we’ve been swimming several times, visited the Birmingham Museum to see Dippy the Dinosaur and been to Kenilworth Castle. Libby has had three full-on days at her holiday camp and Lia has been to soft play, the cinema and another swimming session.

With my husband here, I’ve also had plenty of time to get some work done. A real relief after I’d been neglecting it while it was just me with the girls. But the guilt has kicked in for a different reason this time. It’s usually about working while I’ve got the girls and not being able to spend as much time with them as I’d like. This week though, I’m wondering whether we’re doing a bit too much. Libby in particular is very tired, which manifests itself with her being rude to us and arguing with her sister.

Is there really such a thing as the right balance? I know if we weren’t doing so much they wouldn’t be tired, but I’d feel guilty that they were wasting their Summer holiday.

It has been lovely having the girls together over the past few weeks. Most of the time they get along brilliantly, although when they do argue it can get out of hand quite quickly. On Friday, we went up the hills to take some photos for an Instagram post for a brand. The girls were having a Peter Rabbit Party and something had clearly made them giggle, I really love this photo of them, it captures their personalities so well. I posted the colour version on Instagram but I accidentally put it in black and white on my Insta stories and loved the effect.