Driving the Dolphins Around

No Scandinavian Saturday supper tonight, either (remember last weekend?). The girls had a swim meet in Mandan today, so we ate in Bismarck instead. All three of our Dolphins improved their own records in nearly every event (Abigail even shaved off 26 seconds in one!), so it was a successful day. It was also a lo-o-o-ong day for Susan and me; Suzanna's events were in the morning, and Abigail and Hillary's were in the afternoon, so Susan and I sat in that hot, humid, muggy, stuffy pool area on those hard, backless metal bleachers all day long through a series of events featuring other children punctuated by the occasional one in which one of our daughters was racing. At the end of the day when it was time to leave, we were more than ready.

Suzanna ready to jump into the water

Abigail waiting for her heat to begin

Hillary in mid-leap

We took the girls to a late-afternoon screening of the movie Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on the book by Rick Riordan, a book that Susan and our daughters all read and loved (they've read all the books in the series, in fact). Despite the presence in the theater of three ill-behaved young adults a couple rows behind us, our family enjoyed the movie . . . and, afterwards, the girls enjoyed enumerating the ways in which the characters and plot had been altered by the moviemakers.

Then we had an unsatisfactory supper at a buffet restaurant that shall remain anonymous but whose name rhymes with Bolden Morale (and whose Web site is here). Despite the restaurant staff's best efforts to deny us food (by not replacing items in a timely fashion when the last portion had been taken), we managed to eat our fill. It was a quiet and sleepy drive home, and that bed is a-callin' my name.