Swim Lessons

Drew is taking swim lessons this fall along with his soccer class. He goes twice a week for three weeks before the baby comes. Because we move every summer and then go to Texas for vacation for weeks during the summer, he has not had a chance to take proper swim lessons the last few years. Now that he is 5, this is a must for me even if during the school year.

So, he goes to the Germantown indoor swim center and he is loving it. I think we have a boy who will be a lot like his dad - soccer and swim team! (neither of which I did when I was young - it was tennis and dance for me!)

But he is so eager to do everything the coach is asking him to do from putting his face in the water, going down the big slide, being dunked in the water, etc. I am loving watching his progress. There is something to be said about someone else teaching your child to swim. He would never do any of those things for us.

We only had a problem last night for the first time... Drew got in trouble for fighting!!! Well, to be fair, he and this other boy are always raising their hands to go first and volunteer to try something new. When they both put their hands up in the air, the other boy grabbed Drew's hand and they began pushing and grabbing each other's arms to get to the stairs first. When the coach saw it and had to break it up, both boys had to sit out for a minute. Afterwards, Drew's feelings were hurt, and I could tell his mood had changed. We have a pretty sensitive boy and indeed when I went to get him minutes later after the lesson was over, he cried all the way home upset that he got in trouble. I explained to him that he was not in trouble anymore, that he had already had his time out, but that we needed to discuss what we could learn from it (keeping hands to oneself, not always having to be first, not everything is a competition, etc.). I think we have a very competitive boy on our hands - everything is "I win!" and we've been having a lot of talks about it lately. Hopefully, he will learn from this and the good news is that he does want to go back to swim lessons and he's not deterred by this one incident. Maybe he will have a passion to compete and that's not a bad thing but we have to be careful to teach him how to compete with integrity and good sportsmanship! :)