Swimming Lessons

On March 31st, there was an incident. We went down to Greenville, SC for a family wedding and my parents are awesome and agreed to come down to keep an eye on their grandkids, as well as my nephew while we partied down. We set them up in a local hotel with an indoor pool and took care of the pizza during the wedding. While we were getting ready for the evening out, Owen went with his Nana and Papa to go swimming in the hotel pool. At one point, Nana told Owen to stay on the steps going into the pool while she took the 3 steps from the stairs to the door to let Papa into the pool area. When she turned around, 4 seconds later, Owen was gone. He was standing on the bottom of the pool in 3 and a half feet of water, waiting for someone to come fish him out.

This was totally Owen's fault for bad listening reasons, but it also firmly established something. He needed swimming lessons as soon as possible. We spend entirely too much time on the lake boating to have him not become an expert swimmer. Don't make me think of him stepping off a shelf in the lake and going under. When we got home from that weekend, he was enrolled in the next available swim class. My parents called us about 5 minutes after the registration and asked if we were going to get him swimming lessons and offered to pay for them. We graciously agreed to let them.

Last year, we tried to work with him a little bit in the various pool outings, but he loves to play with us too much. He doesn't want to put his head underwater and blow bubbles when he can splash around with Mom and Dad. We also have him in floats the whole time because we don't want to pluck a kid off the bottom every 15 seconds. Not to mention the fact that we really have no idea how to teach a kid to swim.

Swim class was really helpful and he finished his last class in the first series today. Not only did he pass the class, he aced everything including the Spiderman, Superman Arms, and the Spongebob. I'm not really sure what any of those things mean, but I sure am impressed my son can do stuff that those three can. I really wish that there was some sort of funny incident that allowed me to crack wise on his class, but the teachers were on top of them and all the kids did a really good job of bowing to the peer pressure of not sinking to the bottom and listening to the instructors. There was one time he leaned forward really far and almost toppled in, but a teacher noticed it and got him in line. My only complaint is that it was really focused on getting him comfortable with the pool and the basics of sticking your head under water without ingesting anything, but it didn't go too much further than that.

So we start level 2 of swim classes next Tuesday. As Owen will tell you "I don't want to sink anymore." I don't want you to either.

CK