swimming

today was ava's fifth swimming lesson at la petite baleen, and her behavior has improved to the point where i am willing to talk about it. there are many things i really like about la petite baleen. the first is the location - right on the bay, in the presidio, at the end of crissy field. see view from the parking lot to the right. not bad. the second thing is that they are pretty hardcore. these folks believe in the swimming version of "cry it out" - this means that no little bodies escape from the pool for the duration of their 30 minute lesson - no matter what. however, this very strict rule is balanced by a huge amount of compassion, patience and good humor from the instructors. ava's instructor said to me on the first day : "if we let them do what they want, then they learn to manipulate us, see?". hmmm . . . yup . . . got it. okay, you seem to know what you're talking about - we'll give this a shot, your way.

the first class ava screamed at the top of her lungs the entire time, while trying to climb my body to get out of the water. picture her hanging on to my ears for dear life. the second class, she was much improved, and only screamed during the "boat" part of the program. the third class was just plain bad luck. it was an unusually cold day, and therefore daycare was running on a slightly altered schedule. ava wasn't playing outside where she usually was, and we wound up leaving daycare through the "wrong" door. omg. meltdown. must never vary from the routine. never, ever, ever. i never really got her calmed down from the door episode, so she just carried on with the meltdown all the way through her swimming lesson too.

ava cheered up quite a bit for lesson number four though, so much so that her instructor was pretty much jumping up and down for joy. lesson number five was another incremental improvement. still objecting to the "boats", but she's lowered her objection to a dull moan, rather than an ear piercing scream. and, cracking some smiles now and again too. at today's lesson we were also fortunate enough to have grandma along to snap some pics. more pics here.

after two cycles of baby beluga swimming classes, we opted to drop out and take ava swimming on our own instead. This is actually alot more fun, as from 7 AM to 8 AM we typically have the entire teaching pool at the jccsf entirely to ourselves. today we took along a little underwater camera and took some pictures of ava's "jumps" off the side of the pool. more pics

so far Ava has been a good student at baby beluga. while not exactly swimming yet, she has come a long way. she seems to genuinely enjoy frolicking in the pool, and she's even a pretty good sport about going under water.

ava's swim class has kids between 6 months and 2 years of age. watching the older kids, i am very glad that we started her when she was very young and without many opinions. it seems to get a whole lot more challenging for the parents when the kids are old enough to say "No!" and "Nooooooooo".