Swim Lessons
Hello to everyone.
We signed Xavier up for swim lessons. He had two weeks of them, each one lasting about half an hour. As you can see in the photograph, Xavier was not excited by the lessons.
The first day the class had about nine kids. By the end of the two weeks, only three. We made Xavier stick it out to the end, which was a fight. Xavier spent more time climbing out of the pool and running away from the instructor than he spent in the pool. Rebecca spent her half hour not watching, but plopping Xavier back into the pool.
We decided after the first day that Xavier was going to learn comfort in the water. If he would not work with his instructor on floating, kicking, bubble blowing, etc., he would repeat the lessons with his parents. That meant going to the pool every night and working with Xavier.
This worked well. Xavier wanted to work with us, and did so readily. He even started telling us he "wanted to go to the pool—one without the teacher." Apparently, he did not feel comfortable with Miss Katie.
We now have Xavier putting and holding his head completely under water, blowing bubbles, floating on his stomach and on his back. We even crossed the biggest hurdle: having him jump from the edge of the pool into the water. He has even grown guardedly comfortable to be without a life vest on him, so long as a parent is holding him, or his is splashing around in two-foot deep water.
It's required some effort, but Xavier has learned a much greater comfort with deep water (deep meaning over his head). He still needs to learn to swim, but Rebecca and I agree, the comfort with water is what we wanted him to get out of his lessons this year.
He does not yet know it, but we signed him up for lessons again, starting in October. Now that he has the basics under his belt, now he can get what he missed these past two weeks.