Swimming Lessons

In order to attempt to get caught up I need to post a little bit about the boys swimming lessons this summer. They took swim lessons for four weeks and did much better than they did last year. I don't trust them in the water by themselves by any means, but hopefully in one more year they will have finally caught on.

With the exception of living in Vegas until Clayton was 2 we've never lived in a place where learning to swim was considered a critical skill. It's not as if Vermont and Indiana are exactly full of pools. I think it'd be a little more important for them to learn to rake leaves and shovel snow.

However, they did take swimming lessons and I'm proud of them. They each handled their lessons in their own style. Clayton was full of anxiety that he was going to drown and, while he did make progress, there were some days where I wanted to pull him out of the pool and just forget about it. He is careful to a fault in this case. Noah is the opposite. He had to be constantly reminded to join the group and pay attention. He just wanted to do his own thing his own way. Unfortunately, his own way includes a lot of recklessness which is no bueno in a pool. So I had one kid who was clinging to the instructor every second that his feet couldn't touch and one kid who would get distracted in the middle of the pool and have the teachers hurry over before he fell off his noodle.

So that was swim lessons in a nutshell. I'm hoping that we'll be able to find an indoor pool to practice in over the winter. Otherwise there's no telling what they'll forget by next summer.

Here's the pictures (these are in no order other than Noah's first):
Noah loved to go down the slide, off the diving board, etc. Once he just decided that he was going to go down the slide. There was quite a scramble as teachers/parents rushed to get to him before he landed in the water!
Trying to backfloat with Miss Andy. Miss Andy was a really great teacher, but I didn't approve of her swimsuit. Just so you know. Also, Noah is an amazing backfloater in the bathtub, but he didn't like being told to do it in the pool. Typical Noah, if it's not on his terms, forget it!
He always looked so happy in the water. I think if he would learn to swim without the noodle I would never be able to get him out of the water! He's a fish!
I love this picture of Noah, but as I said before, I do not approve of Miss Andy's swimsuit. He was in a class with some friends from church, Daxton and Chloe. It was nice that he had friends in his class!
I didn't realize until just now that I don't have as many pictures of Clayton swimming as I do of Noah. It's probably because Clayton's face looked like this so much of the time:
That's his anxiety/concentration face. I love how careful he is and how badly he always wants to follow the rules. It's such a great skill, unless you're learning something new that doesn't come easily to you (cough cough, swimming, cough cough). Sometimes you have to - literally - jump in and learn as you go. Unfortunately for Clayton, you can't learn to swim before you get in a pool.
However, by the end of the four weeks, he could backfloat by himself for 10 seconds at a time AND when we took our trip to Wisconsin right after swimming lessons had ended, he was able to swim completely unassisted almost halfway across the pool! I'm so proud of him, especially because I know how hard and scary this is for him. He really did try his best and that's all I can ask of him!

I'm not going to be sending the boys to the pool alone any time soon, but I'm proud of the progress they made this summer! Good job boys!