Natalie did a GREAT job during her two weeks of swimming lessons! I am really glad that we decided to go with these semi-private lessons, it was totally worth the expense and the daily drive to Newbury Park. It was fun to see Natalie’s water skills improve so much over such a short time. At the end of the first week, she was grumpy, tired, and not happy at all that the no-nonsense teacher was making her do so many hard things. She told me she didn’t want to swim any more. But after the holiday weekend to recuperate, she went back and LOVED it.
One day Natalie saw one of the older classes jumping off the diving board, and became obsessed with it (which I thought was funny since she was kind of scared of the water and hated putting her face in it). On the last day, the three kids in her class got to jump too. I was really surprised, but she came up smiling, then jumped a second time!
At three years old, it is pretty hard to be coordinated enough to swim with arms and legs at the same time. Natalie got a lot of practice with the kick board and empty milk bottles (genius idea). As you can see, she is all smiles in these pictures. She gained so much confidence by the last day, she even let go of the side and floundered around a bit, whoops… thankfully she’s become practiced at holding her breath, and managed to come up not even sputtering.
She can float like this for 10 seconds! Hopefully we can get enough pool time to keep her skills up this summer.
