Yesterday Zoë had her first swimming lesson. Brittney Ryan from our church is a personal trainer and has been teaching little kids how to swim for quite some time. Z is the most recent of many little ones we know that she is teaching to swim. She teaches out of one of the pools here at the apartment, so Z feels like she’s on her home turf.
(Zoë ran up while I was typing this and I told her I was writing about her swimming so that I could tell everyone about it and she shouted, “I did swimming day!”)
Brittney would hold Zoë facing towards her and then put her underwater and pull her forward. Of course there was a lot of sputtering and fussing when Z came up. Brittney would instantly follow up with words of praise and a big hug. Zoë responds very well to reasoning, so it helped cut down on the fussing when Brittney told her “the less fussing, the more time you get to rest”. Z would come up and almost instantly put her head on Brittney’s shoulder. There was a little difficulty a few times before going underwater where Z would scream that she didn’t want to do it, or wanted to get out, but Brittney did a good job of being kind and firm to her. I have to admit, it was a little tough to sit there and not go get her out, but knowing that she needed to just work through it helped me stay in my seat.
At the end of the lesson, Zoë was actually swimming about 5 feet by herself! I was very proud of her and gave her a big hug and a warm towel. The rest of the day we all talked about how fun it was to go swimming and what a good job Z did. Her next lesson is Thursday and I’ll try to get some video this time.