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Here’s Helen (pink hat) swimming in her fourth swim meet.

It was another good race for her. Her panic before her heat seemed tepid, like she was just going through the motions of being scared since it’s a dull tradition now. Favorite moment: her friend in the lane next to her was far slower, and Helen stayed at the finish line unbidden to cheer her on.

Us, after:

With Alice, after having some celebratory chocolate:

There’s one more picture tonight but it comes with a warning: you can already tell this little girl is going to be a heartbreaker in another dozen years or so.

Last night was Helen’s third swim meet.

Since Elaine is on crutches, I was with Helen at the start instead of waiting for her at the finish like I’ve done in the past. The coaches line the kids up appropriately and they wait their turn, and I sat with Helen chatting about this and that. I don’t want to be the kind of parent that hovers over their child every minute, but a little encouragement and support seems a reasonable thing to offer in a time like this. Helen was in a good mood, happy and goofy, energetic, while all the relay races were done. Then it was time for the individual races, starting with the six & unders. Helen was scheduled for the second heat and doing great… until the first girl took off, leaving nothing between Helen and the water.

She panicked a little then, grabbing on to me and saying she was scared and that she didn’t want to do this. She’d been jittery before the first two races but had been fine this time around, and now all those nerves pounced on her at once. Her eyes were wide under her goggles.

“Helen, you can totally do this” I said and peeled her off my arm. She wasn’t so sure: “but we’re by the deep end!” “Yes,” I said, “you wanted to play in the deep end when we first got here, remember?” Helen nodded weakly, eying the twenty-five yards of open water stretching out before her. “You’re going to do it, you can do it!” I said. The announcer called “On Your Marks!” and I looked to see what she would do. Helen glanced at me, looked again at the water…

…and got into position. My heart leapt.

A second and a half later the horn sounded, and she jumped in. From her first signs of panic to the jump, the whole incident lasted maybe twenty seconds. She was clearly still scared when she jumped, but she did it. I’ve never been so proud of her.

Now the race is on! I walked quickly around the deep end to get to the finish line with a huge grin on my face. I noticed some other parents smiling back, and I wondered if maybe they’d gone through this same thing too. At the finish line Elaine was standing there, braced and crutched and cheering. I only got there a little ahead of Helen, because then when the night was already perfect Helen swam the entire distance without stopping once, a first-ever for her. Just when I didn’t think I could be any happier with her she pulls this out too.

I don’t know how she did compared to the other girls in her heat because it never occurred to me to look. The times will be posted at the pool shortly and I’ll see how she did then. Her first time was 55 seconds, and that’s with a couple of rest breaks hanging on the rope, etc. Last week’s scores haven’t been posted because the latter half of the meet was postponed due to weather and will be finished this weekend. But she has to have just set a personal best.

Alice is a daredevil, almost always TOO brave to try something new or go somewhere alone. Helen is not. Helen is more like me: unsure, very much always aware, introverted and slower to adapt to new things. Alice is like her mom, a performer, who doesn’t always understand Helen’s nature. But I can identify with her accomplishments and failures. Last night was a big night, and as I tucked Helen in I told her so. “But I was scared” she said, and I replied “I know you were, but you did it anyway, and that is the bravest thing you can ever do.”

Driving my car to the dealer this morning (diagnosis: busted inner CV boot slopping grease on catalytic converter… yeah, that’d be the smoke I was seeing) I was making conversation with Alice as we passed the Space & Rocket Center:

Me: See the big rocket, Alice?
Alice: Yup! I haven’t ridden a rocket yet.
Me: Do you know where the people sit in a rocket?
Alice: Nope.
Me: They sit up on the top.
Alice: Sometimes they sit at the bottom, near the flamesquirters.

Not only do I see that Alice is already planning an orbital trip, but I figure ‘flamesquirters’ is a pretty good technical description for a three year-old.

On May 8th of last year I posted some pictures Elaine took of me jumping for joy at the arrival of the UPS man bringing me a new airplane. One shot in particular made it into her scrapbooks and physical prints, one of which sits framed on my desk at work:

Tonight Elaine took another picture:

Another year, another airplane, another picture of me jumping.

But it was the same UPS man!

I’m sitting here wearing the pants (star of The Thing With The Pants). They fit now.

Having dropped ten pounds, I’m no longer counting points but I am far more conscious and aware of what I eat and what is inside. Candy bars, soft drinks, chips and fast food are all but gone from my normal diet. I eat breakfast now.

Next up: a reasonable tan.

Hi. I’m 6′1″ and I weigh 180 pounds wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I’ve been skinny all my life (6′1″ and 126 when I graduated high school) and most people still think of me that way because I have long arms, thin wrists and a pencil neck. But I do have more belly than I’d like, and there’s The Thing With The Pants.

The Thing With The Pants: late last summer I changed office buildings and needed to start wearing something nicer than jeans again. I bought 2 pairs of casual khakis of the same style but different colors, on sale. I liked them so much I went back the next day and bought the other 2 colors as well. Life was good since that’s basically a whole week’s worth of new pants. Come wintertime, I noticed that the pants were tight in the waist and by Christmas uncomfortably so. The engineer in me said “the pants obviously shrank, since other pants you’ve had longer aren’t that tight” but the rest of me said “fix this.”

At 9:30pm Tuesday two weeks ago, I mentioned to Elaine that I was hungry. She asked what I’d eaten that day (a Subway sandwich and the nice but light dinner we’d had) and disappeared for a moment. She returned with some books and started fiddling with a sliding cardboard calculator, asking me questions and making me go weigh myself. “No wonder you’re hungry, you’ve only eaten 2/3 of what you should have in a day” she concluded. So I started looking through the Weight Watchers materials she has, then find another 10 “points” worth of food.

Looking through the values of foods in the books grabbed my attention. Elaine had done Weight Watchers in the past, so I knew that things like carrots are zero points and therefore “free” but I didn’t know the small bag of chips is four points or that the Coca Cola is three. And even those pieces of data don’t really matter so much until I found out that at my current height, weight and activity level I’m supposed to have thirty points a day. That mindless snack is nearly a quarter of what I should eat in a day.

Now, after two weeks of counting points, I’ve lost five of those 180 pounds. I don’t really have a weight goal, but I’ll give it two more weeks before I revisit The Thing With The Pants. Mostly though, I’m completely amazed at the values of food. No wonder America is fat.