November 5, 2018 by drkottaway

Mundane Monday #183: getting ready

For Mundane Monday #183: getting ready.

This organized chaos is from 2010. I am thinking about parents and kids. Here we were getting ready for our yearly synchronized swim team show. This involves painting the hair to stay in place with thick very warm gelatin. We did that outside. It’s messy. Synchronized swimming might not be mundane to you but we all have times when we get ready or help others get ready.

My daughter is the one on the left: mom, you are bugging us.

Ready. Pretty much. With a little trepidation.

And ready hair.

And the whole team in the water, in the finale, hooray, we did it!

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If you want to join in, I will list the entries next week.

For last week’s theme: kitchen close up:

KLAllendorfer with lots of lovely kitchen photographs.

March 18, 2018 by drkottaway

incubate

For yesterday’s Daily Prompt: incubate.

Taken in February 2011. One thing I loved about synchronized swimming is that our older girls worked and played with the younger ones.

And here is my daughter and another teammate posing for one of the younger girls to take a picture: their smiles are much bigger and more spontaneous than when they pose for us!

March 18, 2018 by drkottaway

practice

For the Daily Prompt: patience.

Athletes, singers, scientists, computer programmers, translators, think of all the disciplines where it takes so much practice and patience. This is our team synchronized swim team in 2010.

February 9, 2018 by drkottaway

the luxury of space

For the Daily Prompt: simplify.

We say we want simpler lives, but do we? The Olympics are starting. I took this at the 2012 National Synchronized Swimming event. It was anything but simple. Teams of eight girls, often with two alternates, with gear and parents and coaches, converging from all over the country. Hours and hours of practice, elaborate swimsuits, music, hair fixed in place for the performance, lifts out of the water.

The front part of the pool is empty. The teams of girls are along the edge, warming up, getting ready for competition. There were over thirty teams. Not simple at all.

Magazines portray houses with a shelf or a table, empty except for a vase and a single book. My books escape their shelves and careen around the house, in spite of my little free library… My house does not look like those magazines, but I love it.

What does simplify mean? For me, it is not the empty surfaces. I admire those but don’t much aspire to them. For me it means spending quiet time every day listening to my heart and doing my inner work.

Blessings.