Busy Bees

This almost-done Sunday has been veeeery busy!  But happy busy, not bad busy. 🙂

We attended three ‘events’ today: 1) Anna had a swim meet in the morning, 2) a cousin celebrated turning 5 years old, and 3) we visited Adda and Halli, who were sorely neglected this past November, which seemed to all but disappear in a flash.  Needless to say, we’ve spent precious little time at home today, which was a nice change.

First things first though: Steinunn (Finnur’s sister) is an angel.  Absolute angel!  🙂 🙂

Since we were supposed to show up at the pool (Laugardalslaug) at 08:10 (am!) I’d originally planned to drop Bjarki off with some friends that live very close by the pool (also angels!).  But Bjarki still had a (mild) fever the night before, so I figured that might not be the best plan ever.  Seeing how Steinunn and Einar live pretty close to our place, I therefore asked Steinunn if she would be willing to wake up ridiculously early to sit with Bjarki here at home in the morning.  And she said yes!  So yes, she’s an angel. 🙂

The swim meet was pretty uneventful really, except it was in a different pool from before, and there were lots of teams.

Anna hoping to play a game on my phone, except that game I installed all of a sudden wanted to download 100 MB over the phone network… Nope, not gonna happen! Let’s try to find a new game!

Looking over the competition part of the pool. This is a 50 m indoor pool, but it can be changed into two 25 m pools by a magically movable wall/platform.

Anna competed in two events: 100 breaststroke, and 50 m freestyle.  The meet had also had events the day before, but we were too busy with other things to compete then (and I wasn’t very interested in spending two days at the pool-side…).  Anna’s never done a 100 m breaststroke before, but she completed it in 2:37.18, swimming the first 50 m in 1:12.93.  When she last competed, just over a month ago, she swam 50 m breaststroke in 1:22.27, so that’s a 10 second improvement or so.  Not bad!

She started the 50 m freestyle really well, but seemed to run out of gas on the second leg – I’m guessing she was probably tired from the breaststroke!  Her time was 55.66 seconds, somewhat less than the 52.29 split time she got a month ago, and only a couple of seconds better than the 57.51 she had a year ago.

I did ask her if she’d enjoyed herself, and she said she really liked the jumping-into-the-pool part, but was less enthusiastic about the actual swimming part!  I will admit that dragging her to meets feels a little weird, but I’ve tried to present it as “it’s a part of practicing swimming” with little to moderate success.  I guess the biggest carrot is really this:

Since the age-gap at these meets is huge (this was 14 years and under) the organizers kindly give out ‘participation medals’ to everyone 10 years old and younger. This sweetened the meet considerably for Anna who’d not been very interested in competing, and really just wanted to lounge at home on the computer (and I would have preferred just sleeping!).

After the meet we drove home to release Steinunn from Bjarki-sitting, and I hope we can return the favor at some point in the future!

We enjoyed a quick pit-stop at home, before dashing to the second event of the day: the 5 year old birthday party of Dagur Ari, son of Ríkey (Ríkey’s late grandfather and my grandmother were siblings).

Dagur Ari blowing out his candles, while his little sister cheers him on!

We ate too much and had a grand time! 🙂

After the birthday party, we headed to Adda and Halli’s.  The four kids went slightly bonkers when we arrived, and we realized that they probably hadn’t seen each other in over a month!  How did that happen?!?!  The adults were running low on batteries though, so there was some much needed napping, before we ate a lovely dinner.  I was veeery grateful not to have to cook and clean up after yet another dinner of mine… 🙂