Friday, August 17, 2012

Swim Lessons: Week 5!

We had a great time at our final week of swim lessons.  I couldn't find Reese's Swim America sheet anywhere, so I finally broke down and ask for another.  Here she is with her stickers after she passed Station 2!  She worked very hard to learn how to float on her back, but she's not there yet.  She actually told me that it hurts her stomach when she has to float because she has to keep all the air in!  She is sooooo silly.

Wyatt has been working so hard all summer to master the crawl and backstroke.  I honestly thought he was going to finish the summer with no gold stickers because he was going to have to swim the length of the pool for each stroke and master the breaststroke before he could pass Station 6.  Of course his instructor left for college this week, so he was switched to a new one.  He's a big fan of consistency, so he wasn't too happy about losing Miss Ally! Ha!

At the end of his lesson on Wednesday he ran up to me and told me that he got his gold sticker!  He was so excited to pass Station 6!  I can't believe how big he's gotten since last summer!
When it was time for the last class of the summer on Thursday, we were all really just looking forward to candy day!  Wyatt told me he thought he was going to pass Station 7 in a day, and I kind of pretended I didn't hear him.  I figured he would just go in and work on the beginnings of the station and be done with it.  Not so much!
To pass Station 7, this kid learned the butterfly and swam 20 meters of it - in half an hour.  I was seriously dumbfounded while I was sitting there watching him.  They started by teaching him the kick, and his teacher was amazed.  So she passed him off to another instructor to teach him the arm movement.  At first he wasn't doing the complete rotation with his arms, so he worked on that for awhile.  They kept him in the pool to test him after everyone else was finished, and he got his sticker! 

I usually try to downplay how impressed I am when he masters something.  Not because I'm cold and heartless, but because this kid pretty much already thinks he's the greatest thing since sliced bread.  While I think there is a genetic basis for this on both sides of his family (cough, Brian, cough, cough, Uncle Marc), I think it's also First Born Syndrome.  We were (and continue to be) kind of awestruck by everything he's done since he was baby - Yay walking!  Yay talking!  Yay swinging the baseball bat! And on and on and on.  I think you can only tell your kid how great something he did is for so long before it goes to his head!  I do want to raise a modest kid, and I want him to continue to work hard for things, so I usually tell him that I'm proud of him for trying so hard to accomplish something, or for showing good sportsmanship, or for helping a friend. 

But...this was pretty cool, so I kind of ended up telling him how awesome he is :).

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