ribbons and wires

The kids got their ribbons this morning - 3 best time ribbons each (they swim 3 individual events). I was amazed. I had to ask, "is their pool shorter than ours?" I was assured that it is the same length. I'm still not quite sure I believe it. I'm also not sure I believe that A didn't DQ in breast, but they say he didn't and 5 other kids in his event did, so they were calling DQ's. But, whatever. Maybe they swam well because they had so much competition. One of M's events had 6 heats. 22 kids all swimming one length of freestyle. No wonder the meet lasted so long. I'm so happy that none of the other teams are that large. Our next meet is against a very small team. They will likely all be very good swimmers, but, in this case, quality can't beat quantity (at least not when you don't have enough swimmers to field relay teams). Our team has some very good swimmers too, plus a number of only fair swimmers.

I finally did something I've been meaning to do - I created a chart of the kids swim times. It was interesting to see how often and by how much they are bettering their times. A took 10 seconds off his time for breast. Maybe that shows that he's faster when he's swimming it correctly?

M had a dreaded orthodontist apt today. It was especially dreaded because we thought he was going to have his upper expander removed - it has become a bit embedded into the roof of his mouth. It will probably hurt to have it removed and he knows that. But they said they couldn't remove it today, they still need the brackets in the back. They have re-chained his top teeth together since they were drifting apart a bit and creating a space. On the bottom, they finally put in a wire all the way from side to side to help pull his 4 front bottom teeth into the proper arch-type shape (instead of straight flat across). He's supposed to go back in 4 weeks to get the upper expander removed and have impressions made for permanent type retainers (wire fixed behind the teeth) - just like D.

An amusing note from the orthodontists - they tried to give me an extra kid! I was sitting there reading a magazine waiting on M to be called back to the chair and the Dr looked at me and called mom. I thought maybe he wanted to show me something on another kid that was similar to M, so I walked over. He was getting ready to explain what this kid needed when I said, "you know, this isn't my kid", just as another Dr said, "no, wrong mom". We all got a chuckle out of it, and so did the assistants and receptionist.