Little Fishies

Caleb and Elisa reached the end of their first week of swimming lessons, and they surpassed my wildest imaginations of what they would accomplish.

Elisa can swim quite well underwater, and she continues to work on her crawl stroke and back stroke. On Thursday her instructors took her (and her classmate) to the deep end of the pool using a kickboard. After they got the feel of swimming in deep water, they got to try jumping off the diving board holding a noodle. (Click here if you don't know what a noodle is.) After several jumps with the noodle, the kid got to jump in solo--with no flotation device. When they came to the surface, the instructor would hand them a kick board to use to get to the side of the pool. Elisa looooooved jumping off the diving board and could hardly wait to try it again on Friday. After several jumps, I suggested she try swimming to the side of the pool without a kickboard. She tried--and succeeded--and was thrilled!

Caleb is past "kiddie" swim lessons. He is doing real swim strokes, and doing them quite impressively! In fact, he's done so well that his teacher decided to bump him up a level. Yet despite his strong swimming skills, he was nervous about going into the deep end, but he knew it was coming. The teacher finally had him go off the diving board. The first time he jumped off hesitatingly...squatting down at the end of the board and sort of stepping into the water. The next time was with more confidence, and now he has become unstoppable! I took him to the afternoon open swim and he jumped off the diving board 23 times. This set of lessons has definitely been worth every penny!