I appreciate all of the kind comments on my first guest post earlier this week.  It is a joy to share my thoughts and photos here with you, and I admit that it makes me want to fire up my own blog again!

I'd like to introduce you to my daughter, Kristin.  She's almost 8, and she loves to swim.  And by love, I mean crack-of-dawn, happily-sets-the-alarm sort of dedication.  Four days a week or more, she swims thousands of yards for the sheer joy of it.  

She has big goals, this daughter of mine.  Of course the Olympics are her far-off dream, but she has some shorter term goals too, like qualifying in all four strokes during the summer meets and winning her age group.  We support her, cheer her on, and hope for her success by driving to all of those practices, shelling out cash for coaching and team fees, and helping her to set realistic intermediate goals.  And now for the confession.  I never imagined us as a sports-oriented family.  Not in a million years.  Science?  Sure.  Art?  Maybe.  But competitive sports!??  Other than being vaguely aware of the Olympics, we don't watch sports as a family.  I thought we used sports as a fun way to get some exercise and practice coordination and teamwork skills.  We only tried swim team in the first place because the lessons were so much cheaper than the traditional weekly offerings!

We are homeschoolers, and at the start of summer I write a one page overview of what we hope to accomplish in the coming school year.  There are specific goals like "polish handwriting" but most of the list contains more philosophical ideas.  Number two on the list is "Nurture individual interests with both time and resources as far as they want to go."  And that, my friends, is why we find ourselves at the pool most days, watching our little frog swim up and down and back again, grinning as she climbs out and asking for more.

(This picture cracks me up.  Because she's 4 feet?  And dives in constantly?  In the deeper end, of course, but still.  Bad joke, I know.  That's another thing to know about me, my bad sense of ironic humor!)

I hope my kids live their passions.  Just as Sew Liberated began with a woman who loved to sew and wanted to share her gifts with the wider world, so too can my own children find their gifts and turn them into their livliehood.  We can hope for a million dollar Wheaties box endorsement, but more realistically, swim coach, sports reporter, pool owner and even teenage lifeguard are all options for a girl who can't resist the water.

Explore.  Find your passion.  Then live it.  The work is light when your heart is in it.