Lucy's Swim Lessons - June 24 - August 15, 2013

In addition to Lucy's dance class this summer, I signed Lucy up for swim lessons at the local recreation center. It's so nice to have a facility so close with so many offerings (literally, we can bike there). For the swim lessons, you can choose from doing it once a week every Saturday for eight weeks, twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for four weeks, or four times a week Monday-Thursdays in the morning for two weeks (for a combined eight classes per session). Since we didn't have much else going on, I figured we would do the Monday-Thursday class in the mornings so we could keep our evenings and weekends open.

The swim lessons just lasted half an hour so we could choose between a 9:00, 9:40, 10:20 or 11:00 am class. We ended up doing three two week sessions and mostly opted for the 10:20 am class so I could have time to get ready in the morning and do a chore or two.

This little guy was such a champ all summer. Sometimes, he would nap before the class, other times, he would fall asleep on the drive and nap during class, and then other times, I would have to rock him to sleep during the class or while Lucy was showering or getting dressed. As much as I would like my kids to have more of a schedule, we need some flexibility too and I was glad that he could just go with the flow.

Since thirty minutes isn't very much time to get anything productive done like run errands or go back home and it was hard to read while taking care of Grey, we kinda just hung out and watched Lucy.

Our recreation center's swim program offers the Starfish Swim School and has colored stages based on abilities. The program starts on white but Lucy started on the second stage which is red since she already loves the water. I just wanted to sign Lucy up to keep her busy but once I saw the quality of the program and how much the kids were learning about safety and building a foundation for swimming later in life, I was really satisfied in my small investment (just $24 for each 8-class session!).

The maximum number of students for each class is six and the ages of the kids can really vary. In Lucy's first session, there was one girl who was the same age as her and six and eight year old sisters and an eight year old boy. I'm glad I got her started early. My only problem with the swim lessons is that they had the kids wait on the side of the pool while working with each child individually and I could see Lucy shivering like crazy from being so cold!

Lucy trying to keep warm!

Some of the skills they work on in the red stage is front and back floating and front and back streamline.

Lucy doing a back streamline.

Waiting in line to practice jumping in the water and surfacing on her own.

Absolutely no fear of jumping in the water (even though she can't reach the bottom and doesn't have any flotation device).

On the last day of class of the two-week session, the kids were rewarded by going on the big red slide. Unfortunately, Lucy was too scared to go on the slide so she missed out. Usually, she is so fearless but every once in a while, she lets her fear get the best of her. I know she would love it so much if she just tried it but I want her to make that decision of when she is comfortable on her own.

Here is the little evaluation we received at the end of her session. She wasn't able to master two of the skills for the red stage so she had to repeat it for the next session but I was fine with that. I would rather she is really comfortable with each foundation skill before she moves on to learn new things which build on that skill. And it didn't matter to her - she just had so much fun in class and didn't really think of it as "learning".

Since Lucy loved swim lessons so much for the first session, we decided to continue it and invited her good friend, Aeli to come along. Since Aeli's parents work, she usually goes to daycare down the street (where I used to send Lucy - that's how they became such good friends) but I just had her come to my house in the morning to play with Lucy until swim class and brought her to daycare after we were done (or sometimes, let her play all day at my house with Lucy which was actually great because it kept Lucy busy).

This picture makes me laugh because Aeli is so much taller than Lucy and they are only a year apart. I love what good friends they are.

This was the only other picture I got from the second session. It was the last day and Lucy finally went down the slide! Actually, her teacher for the second session (who is 17 and goes to our church and used to babysit her) kinda pushed her down. And she had so much fun! I'm so glad that I got a picture of it. Her old teacher from the first session was able to meet her at the bottom.

Here is her second evaluation. She passed all her skills and moved on to the yellow stage which I was so happy about because I was worried that Aeli would pass and Lucy wouldn't and that they wouldn't be in the same class anymore. There are multiple color stage classes going on at the same time so if they weren't in the same class, we would have to coordinate to find a time with both a yellow and red class. But fortunately, we didn't have to worry about that.

After the second two-week session of swim lessons, we took a break for a few weeks because we were going on vacation to California. But we started up again in the beginning of August right after we returned from out vacation and Aeli's older brother joined us (in a different class - so glad we could find a good time that offered both classes and wasn't too early at 9:40 am). Even though the classes were only half an hour, our excursion often ended up being closer to a full hour because the girls would take a shower together and then get changed and they took so long. Poor Willem (Aeli's brother) just had to wait in the lobby for us but I warned him it would be a while with these crazy girls.

Here is the third evaluation. I was a little confused because they used the same evaluation for the red stage and not for the yellow stage even though the girls were signed up for yellow stage. But it didn't really matter since it was the last session of the summer. I think that I will start her in yellow for her next class anyway since she will have had such a long break from it. The third session was a little crazy anyway because her normal instructor was not able to teach for most of the session because she suffered a crazy sunburn so there were different teachers all the time. So I think that made it difficult for the kids to learn having a substitute each day with a different teaching style they could never get used to. But they still loved it and had lots of fun.

I didn't take any pictures the last session but it was pretty much the same. Lucy looked forward to it so much but it was the last morning session of the summer since school was starting in a couple of weeks. I'm very happy with her improvement of swimming although her comfort level with the water worries me a little bit because she is so fearless now and I think it is a good thing to have a healthy amount of respect for the water. But we will definitely continue the swim classes next summer. The swim classes are offered during the school year as well, but only on Tuesday and Thursday nights or Saturday mornings and I'm on the fence about whether to sign up or not because I want to keep our evenings and weekends open. But for the summer, it's perfect.

Now Lucy wants to be a dancer and a swim teacher. Fortunately, I think with this swimming program, it will be easy for her to become a life guard and swim teacher when she is a teenager which will be the perfect job in high school for her. I can't believe that we are starting to plan that far ahead.