Swimming Lessons

Last summer I never got around to putting the boys in swimming lessons. We were living in the apartment still, so we went swimming at the pool there pretty often. For free. So I decided that that counted.

This summer I wanted to make sure they took some official lessons. I decided to take them to the YMCA since they had the schedule I wanted (M-Th for 2 weeks). So I signed the boys up for a session in June. At 50-something dollars each, I just couldn't justify putting newly 3 year old Katy in.

Then I found out about their Y Splash class. It was one week, all 5 days, 45 min classes. The first 15 min was on water safety, then 30 min of swimming in 2 big groups. It was FREE! Not only that, successful completion of the class (showing up every day) gave us a coupon for half off a session of swimming lessons!

I'm not spending over $50 for Katy to take lessons, but I'll spend half that! Also, it made it so I was willing to put the boys in for another session. Everybody was happy!

So, swimming lesson pictures are rarely all that good. I have many where I'm not even sure which is my child. These are the best of them:

The first day (and in the Y Splash class), Katy refused to put her weight on any of the floating things. Then she got brave and learned to kick using the "marshmallows!" She might not have learned to actually swim (which is why I didn't want to put lots of money into it), but she made progress!

I'm pretty sure that's Ryan swimming on his back.

I don't know why I have a close up of David and not of anybody else, and not a good shot of him swimming. Oh well, here's proof he was there!

Well, I got a good movie of David swimming at least! That's him going from the right to the left. I was very impressed with the progress he made. His crawl stroke got a lot smoother, and he started being able to breathe without having to stop swimming.

Here's Katy kicking with the marshmallows. I have to admit, I had a hard time remembering to watch her brothers. They were farther away for one thing, and they mostly just kept going back and forth in various combinations of using or not using the kickboard & swimming on their front or back. Katy's teacher had them do all sorts of cute different things. She had so much fun, and I loved watching it!

I didn't get a good shot of Ryan swimming with his class, so I had him swim for me during their free time at the end. It's dizzying watching him go forward instead of sideways. Or maybe it's how all over the place he is. Believe it or not, this demonstrates great progress on his part as well!

So, to summarize, everyone made noticeable progress and had a good time! Yay!