Swimming

I'd like to point out to all of you lamenting the end of the summer, and you know who you are, that technically the autumn equinox falls around my birthday this year. That means you still have nearly six weeks to enjoy summer and shop for my birthday present.

Of course, I do realize that you don't care so much about the season as the start of a new school year. Jonathan starts in a week. We are totally clueless parents. We got a list of supplies, which we bought on sale at a local retailer. We see on the calendar that Back-to-School Night is at 6:00pm on Monday. What is Back-to-School Night? Do we all go? Just the parents? Will we learn important things like where to purchase school lunch and how to find our boy at the end of the first day of school? These are things that I do not know.

But before we talk of school, I ought to write a post about the summer's swimming lessons. I believe that all children should learn to swim. Last summer we intended to take lessons, but it never warmed up above, oh, 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though our local pool was indoors, I postponed.

This summer I finally enrolled Jonathan in four weeks of swimming lessons. He made progress. He started out afraid that the water would seep into his ears and wash out his brain and cause sudden death. The first day of swimming lessons, when his teacher told him to lay back in the water, he looked at her in alarm.

"But I'll get water in my ears!" he said.

"But you're supposed to," she replied.

He got over the water in his ears thing. He then moved onto the stage where he is floating on his own, provided the teacher leaves one little finger on his back. As soon as the one little finger moves, a vortex will open up into space and suck him into the vacuum and cause sudden death.

We got over that one, too. After the first two weeks, he was floating on his own, front and back.

He then reached the stage where he ducked under water, flailed arms and legs at the same time, and came up grinning.

"Did you see me swimming, Mom?"

He is still in that stage. Summer swim lessons now end with Jonathan able to push off the pool wall and let the momentum carry him forward. But when he tries to get his arms and legs involved, he sinks or moves backwards. Or sinks backwards. Trying to get the arms and legs involved is definitely progress. Not bad after the first four weeks of real lessons in his life, I think. I have been seriously considering keeping him in swimming lessons in the fall. Except that I would have to shuttle him to and from, and I'm not a big fan of the shuttling. Shuttling is like sinking backwards.

Finally, while talking about swimming and school starting, I should mention that we still have about ten more passes to the local swimming pool which need to be used up in the next week before school starts. I don't think our family will use them. I know I have some readers who are more local. Would any of you be interested in helping us use up these passes?

Unfortunately, to get the pass, you may have to reveal your secret identity in the comments or something.

Dang. I knew there was a catch.