Yuri Day is all smiles as he awaits his turn Saturday in the Dolphins swim meet against Prestonwood.
When the Spring Creek Oaks community swim team had a few new members join their club this season, head coach Kelsey Muller was pleasantly surprised. But having new swimmers each summer is nothing new – the participants change every year.
What has impressed Muller the most is the leadership displayed by one of her newest competitors in particular - 12-year-old Yuri Day.
“He’s a pleasure to have on the team, and all of the kids certainly look up to him,” said Muller. “Every now and then you find a leader who may not even be the best swimmer, but just shines, and this year it’s Yuri.”
Day doesn’t see himself as an inspiration, and doesn’t try to be. He just wants to be another member of the team. What sets him apart from his teammates, is that he was born with only one complete limb: his left leg. He has half of a right leg, half of a left arm, and no right arm.
“He uses every part of his body to swim and feels free in the water, but he kicks with all he has,” said Mary Ann Day, Yuri’s Mom. “Other than his missing limbs, he’s like any other kid. He’s bright, smart, and competitive, and has hopes to one day make the USA ParaOlympic swim team. We think he has a chance.”
Day was born in the Ukraine and was immediately became an orphan. When Mary Ann and her husband George – a member of the US Air Force stationed in Virginia at the time – decided that they wanted to expand their family after having four biological children of their own, they started looking at the adoption process.
One day they stumbled across an article written in an Ukranian newspaper that had been translated to English on the internet, about an orphan that had great artistic skills, and was hoping to be adopted by an American family. When they finally took their first trip to meet him in person, they knew their answer right away.
“There are so many kids in the world that don’t have parents, so we figured this was a great way to add to our family,” said Mary Ann.
Within three months of being with the Day family, Yuri was speaking perfect English, and his adopted siblings took him in like one of their own. Since then, the Days have also added a second adopted boy – four-year old Caleb from China – who has several malformed fingers on each hand, and they are in the process of taking in a two-year-old little girl from China that is missing parts of each arm.
“I can’t imagine having a small family, it would be pretty boring,” said 12-year-old Peter, an eighth-grader at Strock Intermediate. “I’m the only one allowed to pick on Yuri.”
Even though the brothers don’t attend the same school – Yuri goes to Trinity Lutheran because his parents thought a smaller environment would be better for him – all of his siblings have gotten used to helping him adapt, and stick up for him when other kids start to stare.
“If we didn’t have such great support from our own kids, we probably wouldn’t keep adopting these children with special situations,” said Mary Ann. “It wasn’t something we set out to do, it just sort of happened.”
Yuri likes to swim the freestyle, butterfly, and backstroke. “My favorite event is the butterfly, but really I just like being on the team, and being here every Saturday by the pool with my friends,” said Yuri, after taking a break from a game of Uno in between his heats. “I don’t see myself as being any different than them.”
Day was fitted with a custom prosthetic leg that he wears to walk around, but says he doesn’t want anything added to his arms. Since he has never known anything else, he can already use his smaller left limb to eat food with a fork, and he uses his chin and right shoulder to grip a pencil in order to write. “And I have a pretty good grip on things with my toes as well.”
The family has lived in the Klein area for only a year after moving here from Del Rio, Texas. They travel to Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas for Yuri’s free health care for any surgeries and prosthetic fittings he may need.
“He has such a great approach to life,” said Mary Ann. “Just every now and then he wishes he could ride a bike.”
