Sundays with Stretchy Pants

As of two days ago, if you come across Maya she’s very likely to say something like, “I gotta show you sumfin. It’s cool!” And then she will take you out to the swingset and show you how she can get herself swinging and keep herself going by pumping her legs. And then when you give her the appropriate props for that, she’ll say, “CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?” where she will show you her other brand-new feat of jumping in and going under the water. Under it! “Where people can’t even breeeeve, so I have to hold my breff! Isn’t dat cool?” And then she’ll swim around under the water with a great big smile on her face and tell you over and over that she doesn’t need her life jacket anymore and she’s ready for swimming lessons. You’ll agree with her that she’s cool, because she is.

It’s been a big weekend for amazing feats of pool bravery for all of the girls. Lena has been regularly jumping off of the 8-foot springboard after previously going off of it once and deciding to never, ever do it again. Over the weekend, she jumped off of it for about 2 hours straight, adding little tricks like a half-twist with a peace sign flash. Liberty (after the horrible influence of Dawn’s older kid) has been going off of the 16-foot platform. She went off it for the first time when Noah was there a few days ago and I really thought she wouldn’t do it again, but she did it several times yesterday. All my girls are bad asses. Watch out for them.

One teensy hard part about this is trying to convince Lena that she can be proud of jumping off of the 8-foot board. An age difference of more than a minute would come in handy here. I think Lena might feel like it’s not a big deal anymore because her sister, who is the exact same age as she is, jumped off of the 16-foot platform. Indeed, when Liberty went off the platform, Bryan and I walked all the way over there to congratulate her. We did that with Lena when she went off the 8-foot for the first time, too, but that had been days earlier and I’m pretty sure the glow from that moment had worn off. It’s tough to balance one girl’s feel-good feelings with the other’s feelings that her good thing isn’t good enough, when it really is good enough. This is one of those times when being a twin would so suck. We try to teach them that they can’t compare themselves to each other or to any other people, there’s always going to be somebody who can do more or less, blah, blah, blah. But I think it’s hard to live that lesson sometimes. I think it’s sinking in, but I just think it’s hard. Still, they’re bad asses. Total bad asses.

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