You can swim: 5 days later, unbelievable victory.

You can swim – these are words I didn’t expect to be coming out of my mouth this week.

Last week I call the damp times. My children were going to summer camp during the day, which involved getting them to a bus and shipping them off for evidently a whole day of swimming and fun.

We had had a very heated conversation with a very exhausted and angry child the day before the damp times about how she was going to have to wear a life vest because she straight up couldn’t swim. It was heated enough that it was quite out of character for the little one.

My oldest also had swim lessons two nights a week at the YMCA. My youngest would come along with us, spend approximately 12 minutes at the YMCA outdoor pool before it closed, and then move into the indoor pool where we would swim and observe the swim lessons the oldest was having on the other side of the pool.

Basically in 9 days the kids swam 9 times in 4 pools, visited a waterfall also. My skin was absolutely not happy as the YMCA pools do not agree with it. We went through hair detangler, chlorine removal shampoo, I was scrubbing with every type of soap to try and not smell like a pool, running a load of laundry every day just for swimsuits because damn it smelled like a chlorine factory.

My guess is Thursday we were at the Y and my oldest was at a swim lesson, exhausted from a day full of playing followed by a night of swim instruction. The little one went under water and came up seven feet away in remarkable time. A quick testing of her skills indicated that this little dolphin can swim almost as fast as I can now.

She can’t stay up and tread water yet, and is pretty not great with her hand operations… but damn… you can swim little one.

You can swim

She swam across the pool once, I made her sit out for a minute when she said she was going to do it again. I keep stressing to her that excitement isn’t energy that one can maintain and breathing water hurts.

But yeah, watched a splasher become a swimmer in a couple of days (not great yet but impressed me.)

I think the shocking part for me is with the oldest I watched lesson by lesson and was there for everything. With the camp they were going to I got to miss a good four days worth of learning and that seems to be exactly what was needed. That or doing it every single day to the point my washing machine smells like chlorine now.

Oh, as a note this seems a little ess-ee-ohey (with the “you can swim”) because theITbaby was originally set up as a testbed for a Pocketables experiment, and once again is being used as such. Oh, the rest of the content is real, and even this is, but there’s an attempt being made at the moment reach six hundred words and as such I’m drawing things out. Real story, real everything, just going for a word count so that maybe I can make enough to buy them that Barbie Dreamhouse they’ve evidently been hankering for.

Evidently my Mattel app contacts are not going to transition us into Big Plastic, which is fine… I’ll write about the project and test that I’m doing later when I have some results.

Oh yeah, moral of this is your kiddo is going to swim at some point and it’s going to probably surprise you.