Swim lessons

Oops - I went a little out of order. During the week between Difficult Run and Ocean Dunes, Theo and Ida took swimming lessons. Their teacher was so wonderful. Ida was previously afraid to even lean her head back in the water to get her hair wet, and forget about getting her face wet, but by the end of the week she was happily jumping in and wiggling over to me with all her might. The main object of her lessons was to get her a little safer and more comfortable in the water, and that definitely happened. I was very pleased and will be taking the kids back for more lessons in a few months.

Theo wasn't particularly afraid before he started, but wasn't very skilled either, despite many past summers of rec center lessons. We really just don't go swimming often enough to keep up any skills they've learned. He still can't swim very far but got so much better and I think a lot of that for him was awareness and confidence.

Don't mind the picture-of-a-picture look.

Of course now it's been a few weeks and they've both regressed, since we rarely go to the pool, but I'm going to try to keep it up through the year.

Assuming our local pool doesn't fill up (in the figurative, membership list sense) I'm hoping to have Theo swimming well enough by next summer that he can do swim team. Unfortunately swim team programs in our particular area are a little...intense. Especially as the kids get older. But I think it will be really good for him. Not the intensity part, just the swimming part. I love watching my kids improve their skills. They are so excited and happy and confident and proud to learn new things that seemed impossible to them previously. It's how they both acted after learning to walk, and learning to use the toilet, and learning to read, and so on. I can see it in how they talk and act--just exhilarated to be a part of a world they had previously only observed.