Thursday photo #338

Hasn’t the half term holiday absolutely flown by? Perhaps it’s because the last time the children were off school it was for such an insufferably long time. Either way, we’ve packed loads into the past few days and half term is nearly over already. Roll on the Christmas holidays.

A labour of love

Lia has been working incredibly hard on her swimming since lockdown ended. I was surprised that when she first went back, she hadn’t lost any technique or fitness. In fact, swimming in the river and all the other exercise we did during lockdown seemed to have made her stronger. We knew it wouldn’t be long before she moved up into the next swimming group.

With just a couple of things left to tick off, her swimming teacher approached me a few weeks ago. Lia was ready to move up, but still had a slight screw kick on her breaststroke. This just means that the legs are slightly wonky or don’t do exactly the same thing at the same time. The teacher wanted Lia to get this right before moving up, so they were going to do an extra breaststroke session.

Before the session, we managed to fit in two more swims. Lia absolutely nailed her leg kick, to the extent that she was nearly as fast as Libby when they had a race. She couldn’t wait to get to her lesson and show her teacher. It was my husband’s turn to take her and I was surprised when they arrived back rather quicker than expected.

Lia had been so keen to get to her lesson that she’d run down the huge hill to the swimming pool, tripped over at the bottom of it, grazed her knee and refused to go swimming. Thankfully, the teacher made time to see her stroke again last Sunday. As expected, it was brilliant and she was able to move up into stage 6. She was very proud of herself and we all felt that she’d really earned her stage 5 certificate.

Back to the cinema

On Monday, I decided to take the girls to the cinema. We haven’t been since lockdown and we all wanted to see the Secret Garden. Booking tickets online was easy, I just had to choose a group of seats for the right number of people. There were three seats together right at the front of the cinema so we went for those.

When we went in, most of the rows were cordoned off. Those that were open had people at either end of them so no two groups were seated close together. I felt terribly sorry for the local cinema. It is part of the theatre but with most stage shows cancelled, the cinema is their only revenue stream and a tiny number of people can see a film at the same time. It made me realise even more the importance of supporting local businesses.

We bought sweets from a local sweet shop before going into the cinema. I support a local farm shop each week after going swimming too, but I’m really not somebody who shops regularly for anything other than essentials. Whenever I do need to buy something though, I am going to put the effort into supporting small, local businesses. It’s such a difficult time for everyone.

Thursday photo #338

It was fancy dress night at gymnastics this week. There was a prize for the best costume and Libby was adamant she was going to win. With a green face, bat eyebrows, a broomstick, a wand and an extremely serious facial expression, I wasn’t surprised to hear she’d taken joint first place. Lia dressed as Ginny from Harry Potter. She didn’t take it quite so seriously as Libby, but she definitely looked the part and had the pose to go with her costume.