Swimming lessons

We just finished two weeks of swimming lessons for Gavin and Abby today. We were blessed with an amazing two weeks of weather - I don't think there was one day that it was too cold to wear shorts and a tank top! Quite an amazing thing, as many years there's groups of moms watching lessons huddling together with their coffees for warmth! ;)

Gavin did an amazing job this year! Even last summer he would still get really panicky about anything that was too new - going off the slide or the diving board. But this time he did so well, I was just amazed. Here's a video (just off of my phone; with three kids to keep an eye on, I didn't get any good pictures this year) of Gavin jumping off the diving board - this was a few days ago, but today he did it several times where he jumped off and then swam to the side all by himself! They got their report cards today and he passed the level on his first try! Way to go Gavin!

This was the first year Abby has done swimming lessons on her own (I did parent and tot with her last summer). And...she started off with a great demonstration of 'like brother, like sister' and screamed her way through the first couple of lessons. If a drop of water happened to touch her face, she'd scream. When they put lifejackets on to practice floating, she clung with all four limbs to the teacher's neck (not kidding!) and screamed. We had a little talk with her after the first few days and promised her a baby ice cream cone at the store if she could go through her whole lesson without screaming at her teacher. (Yeah, I know...but we had to do something!) :)

Fortunately the bribery worked and after one more day with just a little bit of screaming, she did really well after that. I wish I could have gotten it on video, but it was the cutest thing: she would be involved in the lesson, then would suddenly turn around to look at me, grin a huge toothy smile up at me and yell out "Mommy! I am doing a great job not screaming at my teacher!" She entertained the watching parents, that's forsure. :)

Abby didn't pass her level, but she made a huge improvement in the two weeks, which was wonderful. At today's lesson she even put her face underwater a couple of times (at least one was by accident, but she was pretty calm about it), and practiced her front and back floats with the rest of the class. Granted, she was up on the second step, so the water's only about a foot deep...and she hangs onto the next step up so it's not actually floating...but she was so proud of herself, she would call the teacher and say "teacher, look at me! I am DOing it!" The fact that Gavin, the original screamer himself, is now a 'strong swimmer' according to his report card, gives me such hope for Abby! Hopefully it will work out to do some lessons in the fall for them so they don't forget everything they've learned.

Here's a short video of Abby at her lessons. That's the rest of her class there in the background, probably learning the finer points of back crawl ;) and then there's Abby, hopping happily on the stairs. She was the littlest in her class (you have to be three years old, and she was three and a week when the lessons started) and she couldn't even stand where the rest of the kids were if she wanted to since she was so short.

Here's all the kids in her class lined up waiting to get the go-ahead from their teacher to get in the water. Isn't she cute???