Swimming and Baseball

All of our kids are very active. Justin has played soccer and lacrosse and now lifts a lot (he's about 6'5" now), Hannah likes to swim, dance and play softball, and Jacob plays baseball. Saturday was a big day for the two younger ones, as Jacob had his first All-Star game and Hannah had a swim meet.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but over the years I've become an early riser. So it's not really that big of a deal for me to get up and go to the 6am swim meets (Kelly, you did not just read that). This one was over at Dominion Valley, a relatively upscale neighborhood about seven or eight miles from our house. It's a gated community, so you can imagine that it's pretty affluent.

Hannah was scheduled to swim in the 50m freestyle, the 50m backstroke (her best stroke) and the 25m butterfly. She really enjoys the swimming, though I'm not sure how much she enjoys the 6am aspect of it all, nor the 8am daily practices. She also likes hanging out with her friends at the meets, as a lot of her best friends also swim on the same team.

She's had some trouble with the butterfly so far this year, as she's been DQ'd each time. The bad thing is, we really never find out what she did to get DQ'd, so we don't know how to improve her stroke. This time, however, she got a time (I think it was something like 39 seconds), which really made her happy. She also lowered her times on both of her other strokes. Swedish fish anyone?

I've already reported on Jacob's Saturday All-Star game. They won by a score of 8-2. Jacob did well and so they played again last night against the National League team from Gainesville. There are a lot of boys on that team who have played with Jacob for years now, including playing on the Bulls travel team. So it was with some trepidation that we went to the game last night.

It started out innocently enough. We held them to one hit and no runs in the top of the first inning. The boys played very good defense before coming up to bat in the bottom half. We scored one run to put us up after one. We held them to no runs again in the top of the second, then scored a few runs in the bottom, Jacob getting a screaming line drive base hit to centerfield, then scoring a little later. Score after two full was 4-0.

Jacob came to bat two more times in the game, getting a bloop single to right and grounding out to second. He scored twice in the game and got a few more ribbies, and his team ended up winning 11-0. He made several very nice plays at third base, scooping up one throw from the pitcher to keep the ball from rolling to the fence and saving at least two runs. He also fielded a sharp bouncer and threw home to prevent them from scoring with bases loaded and none down.

Now it's on to Fairfax Dominion. We play them Friday night.