Keep On Swimming

So Joe--and his good buddy Graham--have wrapped their two-week session at the Y's Camp Kici Yapi. We are pretty proud of Our Hero. He navigated some challenges well enough to have had more fun than not, and said he'd go back. He talks about Camp Kici Yapi like it's his camp, like how he talks about Susan Lindgren, his school.

We're especially glad because somewhere toward the end of the first week, we learned that Joe was swimming in a life jacket. We asked why. He told us it was because he didn't take the swimming test--floating on his back and doggie paddling, each for something like five seconds. We did not ask why. We are sad to report that we just assumed our water and swimming loving boy was just being lazy or something, and we expressed some disappointment in him. Early in the second week, when we learned that Joe was just sitting out of swimming, we learned that there was another camper, a bigger kid, who was not being nice to Joe in the water--following Joe about and not letting him out of pool.  This kid was apparently swimming under the divider rope between the shallow and deeper ends of the pool, too, so there was nowhere to avoid this kid in the pool. So Our Hero was just avoiding the pool. Smart; it was tough to blame him once we got our smart on and figured it out. But we were disappointed, too. This was, after all, the boy who was referring to camp as "swimming day camp."

It made us sad, too. There are all kinds of people in the world. Not all of them will be your people and that's o-kay. Our Hero is learning that. But now he is learning that not everyone is nice, at least some of the time, which is a tough part of growing up. It's tough to watch, too. Turns out, you never really stop growing up, and sometimes, it doesn't feel like it ever gets easier. Sometimes people aren't nice to you, or the people you love. And you have to keep swimming, even if you take a breather on the side for a bit. (Hopefully your parents figure it out sooner rather than later, too.)