Friday, January 23, 2009

Fearless

So I achieved an unbelievable, rarely achieved feat.

Be prepared, you may find yourself envious.

I got both of our kids, kids at very distinct and different levels of swimming competency, into lessons on the same evening, at the same time, at the same place.

Holy s&$t.

Last night was the first lesson that they were both able to attend and where I was prepared enough to have actually located swimming suits that fit in time for the class (yes, Eight missed a night due to this sad fact).

Big is by far the youngest in his first on-his-own class and, although he is a thousand percent more composed than I expected him to be, I can tell that the teacher is slightly stressed by his, his, let's call it enthusiasm.

Last night while attending to one of the three other children in the course (how dare she!) he started demanding her attention by showing her a new "trick" which was to hold on to the ledge with his right hand, face outward, and quickly spin around in the water with the goal of then grabbing the ledge with his left hand before sinking like a stone in the shallow-end water in which he is still at least two inches too short to be able to inhale oxygen if standing on the bottom.

He achieved his goal in this trick only about eighty percent of the time, at which point the teacher had to quickly pull him up, leaving her current charge in the lurch for a moment or two and ultimately leading the teacher to tactfully lift him out of the water so that he had to sit on the ledge and watch the other kids do the task at hand.

He is literally fearless in the water.

When the time of the lesson came to an end, he turned to me and wailed, never wanting to leave the pool even to eat or drink.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

WOW that IS an amazing feat! How hard was it for you to watch Big going down and not jump in after him yourself? I would like to get Matthew into swimming lessons, but the whole schedule thing isn't working so well for me.