He's a floater

These are a little late, but after working four weddings in three weeks and going through thousands of my "professional" photos I was a bit tired of, well, uploading.

Anyway, the boys took swimming lessons this summer and Eli especially loved it. He learned how to swim almost immediately and I've never seen him so conscientious and driven about a sport. Normally he's the kid who kind of stops paying attention during first-grade football and gets a wavering spiral to the forehead. Or gets bored during soccer and just stands at one end of the field waiting for the ball to come to him. Or gets put in the t-ball outfield again and again by an overly competitive coach of 7- and 8-year-olds to the point where when the ball finally does come to him he just watches it roll by. All of these I witnessed in the last year.

But swimming is different -- it's an individual sport, and Eli is an independent kid. He's studious by nature, and he gets to study the strokes, perfect them, on his own. The pride I felt seeing him float on his back with ease, his eyes closed in concentration, finally in his own little world of athletic achievement, made my throat clamp up.

Jackie, on the other hand, is a natural athlete -- coordinated, strong, fearless. His favorite part of swimming lessons was leaping off the diving board and landing on the heads of the instructors trying to catch him. They eventually moved out of the way: