3 Ginger Snaps

Since the time that I first started writing this blog back when Arden was a baby there have been many great moments that I have been fortunate enough to capture with a photo. Some of them have made the blog. Many of them have not. All of them have been taken on an iPhone. And even though the iPhone is almost always with me most of the moments I would have preferred to capture I missed for one reason or another. Maybe I couldn’t get the camera app open fast enough. Maybe I was too apathetic about capturing the moment until it was too late. Woulda… coulda… shoulda… and every now and then I just get lucky and capture a moment that is such a rare raw pure snapshot of life that it is just more special to me. Today was one of those days. 

Arden didn’t start out as an avid or confident swimmer. In contrast to her two older sisters who were jumping into the water shortly after learning how to stand, Arden was never interested in that. She didn’t like getting her hair or face wet. Putting her face in the water was out of the question. Bath time and showers became were highly confrontational. 

Then in summer 2016 she spent a week At the cottage with my parents and something changed. I credit my dad. I don’t know how he did it – as I wasn’t there. And neither was anyone else. It was just the two of them and the dock. And that is probably why things worked out as well as they did. When we dropped her off she was comfortable in the water up to her waist. A week later, she’s Jimmy Superfly Snuka. 

And since Summer 2016 she has been consistently ramping up her interest and involvement with swimming whenever she gets the chance. She is now comfortable swimming in moderate surf in the ocean, and leaping off any ledge that is less than 1m in height. She even jumped off the jetty on Koh Rong Samloem when we were there for a week. The drop was long enough for the expression on her face to change from “this is fun” to “this is terrifying” right before she hit the water. That drop was about 3m. She didn’t repeat that one. But now I’m off track. 

Arden loves jumping in the water. Today alone she must have jumped in between 75 and 100 times. No exaggeration. Up until arriving in Thailand her jumps into the water have been kind of uncoordinated. She mostly just adopts this flying monkey star shaped stance in the air as though she is ready to grab on to some post or vine to stop her fall. It has the same effect as a stride jump when she hits the water and she has mastered keeping her head above water when she jumps in. But that has all changed in the span of a week here. She is now doing pencil jumps, cannon balls, and, as of today she has figured out how to dive. The astonishing thing is that it only took her two tries to get it. When I took this series of photos I was fully expecting to get a string of pictures that showed the classic learning to dive leap that inevitably ends in some form of belly flop for most kids. And she totally took me by surprise. 

She’s the third child in the family so we don’t have her first steps or her first words or much else by way of documenting her early years. And today I caught a lucky break and captured her first dive. 

​