The Water is Wide

We signed Sonny up for special ed swimming lessons. Apparently the first three or four lessons will cover “getting your child into the swimming pool.”

I am reasonably certain I did not dream the summer of 2006. Back then, Sonny attended a summer program that included time in the high school swimming pool. I remember thinking: Good luck, but the couple of times I went to observe him, he laughed in the arms of the lifeguard or counselor, and splashed himself silly, and threw a basketball .00001 inches into the hoop, and in general had himself a fine old time.

Did we build on that positive experience? Noooooo.

Fast forward a couple of years, and now we’re taking Sonny and Peanut to that same pool for public swim. As soon as Sonny saw the pool, he started crying. What the? Did he not remember having the time of his life in that pool, back when he was, um, six years old? It took much of that summer to get him back in, and even then he clung to me like a barnacle on a shipwreck.

Now we want to teach him how to swim, and we’re back to my original thought back in 2006: Good luck. After about twenty minutes, I convinced him to sit with his feet in the water, so that he could splash me. (I was in the pool. Freezing my eyeballs out, to be perfectly honest.) I would occasionally splash him, which he found amusing enough, but not so much that he now intended to move on to full-body immersion. So we played catch with a plastic dolphin, and he continued to splash me, and that was the end of his first swimming lesson.

Hopefully before this whole thing ends six weeks from now, I’ll have succeeded in getting him moist. And hopefully the water will get a little warmer, because right now I’m not looking forward to getting back into that pool myself.