Treading Water

Down to one kid in water wings!

Many hours have been spent in gramma’s pool between now and the time he was wearing swimming diapers. Swims with gramma, or grampa, or mom or dad, or his aunt, uncle, and cousins, or any combination thereof.

Just recently he mastered ‘goggles and nose holding’ for new underwater adventures and was excited to show me. (I got him to dip down sans-nose holding a few times, but it didn’t last long)

Me and grampa went down to the pool with him and ended up in the deep end letting him swim back and forth between us…showing him that it’s deep in the deep end, but it’s still ‘just swimming’ like in the shallow end (except you can’t touch the bottom). (I had just let him swim in the deep end from me to the wall. ‘You can swim in the shallow end, so all you have to do when i let go is swim to the wall.’ (That turned in to him wanting to swim more in the deep end)

I couldn’t get him to get ‘just kick off from the bottom to get back up’ so knowing he had goggles and nose plugging down, i brought him down to the bottom and let him kick off me to get to the top (where grampa was).

After several kickoffs (the last few making direct contact with the middle of my bathing suit area) I said ‘don’t swim to grampa this time, just stay by me and try to stay at the top. (I could still easily stand up in the deep end, and was able to look down at him while telling him about ‘treading water’ and told him that’s exactly what he was doing now.

I reassured him that I could easily ‘just get him’ if he went under and I was just talking to some goggles, a nose, and a mouth staying ‘just above’ the waterline.

He had recently learned how to swim on his back so I let his portion of a face on the water know ‘when you get tired and think you can’t keep treading water, just float up to be on your back again’ and he immediately went from ‘trying to stay up’ to ‘relaxing on the surface’

Look at that, bud, you’re a swimmer!

When that was done, he swam from half way back to the end to get out