Madison Fish

A friend in our ward who taught swim lessons in California offered to teach this summer so we signed Madison up! We've been talking about wanting to do this for a while so the timing was perfect. Jordan especially really wanted her to have private lessons in a backyard pool, which is the way he learned. Alissa did just that using the Anderson's pool, and it worked out great! We did a three-week series with 20-minute lessons on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. It was nice for me because it broke up the afternoons and McKinley and I got some good quality swim time while Madison worked with "Teacher Alissa." Between that, our weekly Mom's group swim day and random evening swims, there were some weeks we swam five or six times in a week!

We weren't really concerned about Madison actually learning to swim; we just wanted her to be more comfortable in the water. She's always loved to go swimming but refuses to get her head wet or go under the water in any way. She sometimes even struggles getting her hair rinsed in the bathtub. The first week of swim lessons was the same. She was excited to do it, but was very insistent that Alissa always hold onto her and had trouble going under or jumping in. I tried to stay completely out of it and let Alissa be in charge, but at one point, Madison was hysterically crying on the side of the pool refusing to jump in without Alissa holding onto her and I had to intervene. We definitely didn't make much progress despite pleading, bribes, etc. on mine and Alissa's part. Then, the next Tuesday, as we were driving to her lesson, Madison very simply informed me that she had been thinking about it and decided to swim all by herself today. And she did!!! It was seriously a complete turnaround from the previous week! She was all about it and willing to do anything Alissa wanted. And she seriously LOVED it!! She got so excited about every new thing she could do and would sometimes just start going by herself before Alissa was even ready for her! She learned to do jumps and dives into the pool, swim with her head in the water, dive for toys on the bottom, float on her back and alternate between swimming and floating to give herself a chance to rest over long distances. She now loves to show off her skills whenever we go swimming. She jumps off the diving board at the place we swim with the Mom's group and is always throwing things into the pool to dive for them. Now, don't get me wrong; she still can't really swim. She can go about three strokes and then has to stop because she never learned how to turn her head and breathe. But she definitely thinks she can swim!! Jordan and I joke now that she knows just enough to be truly dangerous! So we still make her wear arm floaties in the pool, for our own peace of mind. But now she's a little fish, a Madison Fish, as she calls herself :)

This picture and the next picture are her diving to the bottom to pick up toys