Swimming success

After Esther, Julia has now taken up competitive swimming. Nervous times and much nail biting by Julia and her parents. But no problem - she came third in her first ever 25-meter breaststroke race. In her heat, she was second, a fraction of a second behind a boy who somehow had sneaked into a girl's race.

This was a little hard to swallow for Esther, who has been training hard and swimming competitions for months with about the same level of success. While she didn't win a medal, she did carve four (count 'em,  four!) seconds off her personal best in the 50-meter freestyle and swam a classy 25 butterfly. I don't think I could swim 25 centimeters of butterfly, so I was very impressed.