The Swimming Lessons
It's not the teacher - it's the student that's the problem
Save for a year or so when COVID was in full swing - we have regularly taken the child for swimming lessons and the result so far is very similar to this:
Let’s just say she’s not a fish and she’s definitely related to both BW and myself with not an athletic bone in her body You see smaller children just splashing around without a care in the world and then there’s my child:
See? Shes hanging on to that flutter board for dear life. I did witness her get pushed to the bottom of the pool to retrieve a fish at the bottom so it’s not like she’s not trying.
She’s just a horrible swimmer.
I just don’t get it. She likes swimming and she never fights to go and she has a good time. The big issue I have is she doesn’t pay attention.
Hocus Pocus Focus!
She’s off in la-la land for the half hour for the most part with small little windows of paying attention open for a split second before being slammed shut once again and the day dreaming continues.
She gets these daydreamy swimming lessons from the woman that wehave named to be The Swim Lady.
The Swim Lady does not answer her phone, but if you text her she’s on it and answers immediately. I then had to endure about 3 days of back and forth text messages about why I wanted to use her class to teach my daughter to swim instead of using the franchise one in the mall.
Spoiler Alert: The franchise swim school sucks - that’s why.
It took way to many text messages back and forth before I had her enrolled. I became a US citizen easier than it took my daughter to get registered for swim lessons with this woman.
But the teachers are many and skilled. They also don’t offer any floating devices or crutches. (save for the flutter boards). From day one they just toss kid after kid in the pool and hope they come up for air.
And, they do.
The Swim Lady has lots of eyes and ears on all their charges so I have no fears of her being harmed in any way. It’s a strange little environment but she is learning how to swim, but holy she’s taking her sweet old time.
Then there’s the venue: Take a swimming pool that’s been designed for probably 10 people and then add about 40 more kids to the soup. Double that number for the amount of parents milling around in various forms of shapes, sizes and dress. The pool deck is soaked with water and it’s way too hot in there so you either freeze going from the car to the pool or you wear a coat and then swelter to death for the half hour while you watch your kid get tossed into the pool over and over again.
She’s trying and that’s all good and all but the sooner I don’t have to take her to swimming lessons the better.
Trying to change a spaced-out, distracted and wet child out of her swimsuit and into her clothes while she doesn’t pay a lick of attention and just states over and over again: “I’m cold!”
Yeah, I won’t miss swimming lessons one bit. As soon as she can swim from one end of the pool to the next, that’s going to be good enough.
Or, she can turn 16 and driver herself. It’s a tossup what will happen first.
We Have That at Home.
Today’s WHTAH are the swimming googles she has on in the photo above.
This might be the sixth pair we have gone through. I have no idea what happened to the other five. Of course, in the hustle and bustle of getting the child changed into warm clothes from the wet swimsuit there’s been more than one pair of pink diamond swimming googles lost or left behind.
For a while I gave up on buying her any more as we were going through what seemed to be a pair every weekend. I’m pretty sure for about six months she was using borrowed pairs.
The last time we thought we lost this pair, we chanced it and went and asked if the had them in the lost and found and lo and behold some kind soul returned them. So thank you fellow frustrated parent!
These cost about $20 a pair so we’re hanging on to these as well as we can and when swimming is done they get placed right back into the pocket in her backpack so we know they are where they need to be.
Hopefully this is the last pair I buy.
This is hysterical, especially how unapologetically bad she is at swimming! The daydreaming, the flutter board clutch, the chaotic pool deck… it’s all so relatable and laugh-out-loud funny. Thank you!