Swimming

I have been lazy about blogging lately--but I have to write about Emma learning how to swim! She actually accomplished this over a week ago; one day we were at our friends' pool and she asked if she could take off her life jacket. I readily agreed--she can stand on tiptoe in the shallow end, and it was hot enough that I was in the pool anyway. So she did, and she allowed me to hold her hands and help her to swim along, kicking her legs behind her. Then she asked to try it herself--and off she went! She was absolutely tireless, even wanting to head into the deep end. I put two swim noodles under my arms so that she could paddle along and grab onto either my hands or the noodles--and she was fearless.

Now it should be noted that Ben does not swim without a life jacket, so he wasn't terribly happy to see his two-years-younger sister swimming along like a duck. The next day he said he wanted to learn to swim, too, so I did the same with him. However, he completely lacks body fat--whereas Emma is a chubby bundle, he's more like a bundle of sticks!--and he had a much harder time staying afloat. He gets cold far faster, he has to kick much harder, and liking the water much less, he is tenser than Emma is. He did graduate to the point where he would swim in the deep end with a noodle, something he was never brave enough to try before, but he is not paddling along the way Emma does. I reassured him that we have all summer for more lessons and he'll get it as soon as he's ready, and Rachel and Julia helpfully pointed out that they were both later swimmers, 7 or 8 before they were confident swimming alone.

Anyway, I'm proud of my little girl, and joked that we should change her middle name from Grace to Goldfish!

--Jen