Our Lil' Diver...

With Summer in full swing here in HOT AZ, we decided to try Braden out in Diving with the City. He goes to a pool near our house and the practices aren't too early in the morning. It's not super hot and they are not very long, so it's worked out nice.  He is on one of the bigger dive teams and has 3 coaches. There are about 3 times as many girls on the team as boys-he doesn't seem to mind. 

They practice out of the water everyday before they hit the 1meter spring board. I had to throw this shot in of Braden in his team Speedo- he wouldn't wear it for the meet today, lame.  In just two weeks they have learned the Three Step diving Approach, front dives, back dives (although he has yet to do one in a meet), pike and tuck jumps. They have worked a tich on front flips and back twist dives. Crazy huh? His required dives for the next meet include an Invert Dive and a Twist Dive. Yup, pretty sure I have never even tried either of those!

I just loved this 'action' shot. He is totally built for the water. Now if we can just get his flexibility up- he will be amazing. 

His first City Wide meet was this morning. Luckily for us, they split the older kids off so the meet only lasted about 90 minutes. Yesterday in practice, one of the girls on Braden's team hit her head on the board. Needless to say, it freaked the crud out of Braden and he would NOT attempt a back dive after that. Would you blame him??? So we called in a favor to a family friend and took him over to their pool. Not only did they let us use their pool (which BTW has a 1M spring board) but Mikenna (a State Champ Diver headed to BYU next Fall to dive for them) came out and worked with Braden, one on one, for over an hour! His approaches front and back got so good. As well as his dive forms. We hope to work with her a little more this summer to see just how much he can improve. 

But, even with all that help he still wouldn't do his back dive, so we had to change the dives he did today. He did a front dive, a back straight jump and a front straight jump. I'm not gonna lie, this is my first dive meet, so the scoring made little to NO sense. But most of the older kids scored as high as 5 and as low as .5.  The 5/6 year olds didn't scored higher than 3.5. The difficulty makes the score possible go up. ANYWAYS... Braden got two 3's and a 2.5 on his dive and 2's across the board for  his other jumps. 

His Front Dive Straight. 

So we were super excited when they called out the 'Participant' awards and they didn't say his name! That meant he was top 8. He ended up with 6th Place Ribbon and a HUGE boost to his confidence. Rusty and I are so proud of him! The meets start at 7am, and none of us really wanted to get up- but we are so glad we did! Thanks to Noni & Pops and Nana & Grandpa for coming all the way out to watch him. Berk was the best little brother supporter out there. 

After the meet the whole team got together to do their cheer. We are the Gators (our team color is purple though- explain that one to me) and the cheer cracks me up, no matter how often I hear it... "If you hesitate- you're GATOR bait, RAWRRRRR" and then they say "Eat 'em up! Eat 'em up! Eat 'em up- GO GATORS!" There are hand motions and everything. I will have to get a video of it... 

We celebrated with breakfast at Joe's Farm Grill and then going to see UP!

And because I have been given grief over my not-so-subtle absence of photos of a pregnant me on the blog lately, here ya go.  Kids are the perfect prop for hiding bellies, by the way.