Swim Lessons!

Yesterday was our first swim lesson or the Summer. The weather actually cooperated and instead of the clouds and rain we've had for the past week and a half, we had beautiful blue skies and barely a breeze. It was just under 70 degrees for their lessons (at 11am) so the kids shivered when they were out of the water, but in the pool they were fine.

Tessa has taken swim lessons every Summer for a long time. The past 2 years I've had Ash at the pool with me - first as a baby (I used to feed him his mid-morning baby food while we watched!) and then last year as a toddler that wanted SO badly to get in the water with his sissy. It was quite a challenge to keep him from diving in to join Tessa's lesson!

We stayed after lessons for open swim once a week last year, though, and Asher loved it. Becki took Thursdays off and she'd meet us at the pool. She and I would sit in the baby section - waist deep in water - and let the kids swim for 2-3 hours.

Swim lessons begin at age 3.

Oh, you can do "Mom and tot" lessons before that - but I wasn't interested in those. Did them with Tessa and hated them.

Anyway, swim lessons begin at age 3.

Asher's Birthday isn't until August 1, but the swim lesson director said to go ahead and sign him up, so I did.

In a perfect world I'd have taken the kids swimming once or twice before lessons started, so Ash could acclimate to the water - but as I mentioned above, the weather has sucked lately. So this was his first trip to the pool since last summer.

His class consists of 2 teachers and 3 other kids - all girls.

He was NOT a happy camper when he found out Tessa was not to be in his class, and he cried when I put him in the water.

I sat next to him, though, with my feet in the pool, and he calmed down pretty quickly. After a while he joined the class, too - even putting his face in the water to blow bubbles and venturing out to play "Motor Boat, Motor Boat"

There was one more scary moment when the teacher asked Asher if he could look in the water too see if there were any fishies in there...

This is a bathtub fear (talked about in this post) that we have only recently gotten over. When she said 'fishies' he whipped his head around to look at me and I shook my head. He said "there's NO fishies and NO dirty things" - the bathtub mantra that helped us move past his soap scum fear.

So I said "That's right!" and then to the teacher "He has a weird fear of fishies and dirty things in the bathtub that he recently got over" and she said "That's right! where are fishies? In the ocean, huh!"

And all was well.

He ended up having a good time, and was excited to tell Daddy all about it -

"Daddy, we went to swim lessons, and Home Depot, and Target!"

Daddy says "and how was swim lessons, little boy?"

"Good! And I had chicken nuggets for lunch!"

We're excited for Thursday's lesson - I think he'll do much better at getting into the water and getting started now that he's been once. And maybe I'll be able to take some pictures of poor Tessa! I was so busy keeping Ash calm that I never got over to her side of the pool and the only picture I got was this one - after lessons were over.

The rest of the pictures of Asher are here.