Yesterday morning Ethan had his first swimming lesson as a duckling and it went very well apart from a little melt down in the changing room when it was time to get dressed to leave!
The ducking lessons are held in the leisure pool so they are completely different from what Ethan is used too.
We had taken Ethan swimming there this weekend as he hadn’t been for over three weeks due to the Easter holidays and it meant Darren also got some swimming time with him. Ethan has got so much more confidence in the water and actually didn’t want to be held when he was moving around the pool. It was like he was telling us ‘I know how to do this.’ He also discovered the baby slide at the weekend which in turn this week meant that he discovered he can use the back of the bath as a slide so bath time on Wednesday afternoon was very interesting and lasted for over an hour!
The lesson starts in the shallower section of the leisure pool with singing, it was quite hard holding Ethan’s attention for this part as he just wanted to keep going on the baby slide so we ended up moving out of the circle quite a few times whilst I then had to try to bring him back to the group.
The second part of the lesson is held in the deeper section of the pool where they normally activate the wave machine. I was worried about going into this part of the pool as I’m not a strong swimmer and I thought I wouldn’t be able to touch the bottom that well with the fact that I’m not the tallest person in the world but I was just able to stand in this section without any issues. Ethan did very well during this part of the lesson and swam around the pool twice without any help from me.
I actually had two things to face during the lesson that I’m not that keen on. The first thing was jumping into the pool, well more of a lower yourself in from the side, and the second was going down the slide from the deeper section of the pool to the shallow section to end the lesson. My fear of these things comes from the fact that I’m not good with having water splashed in my face and I’m not very confident it water but I’m pleased to say I did both of these things because I also wanted to get over my fears by taking Ethan to his swimming lessons. So not only was I proud of Ethan I was also proud of myself.
The great thing about having these lessons before the leisure pool opens is that after the lesson the pool opens to the public and you can stay on if you wish. This also means all of the water jets and fountains are switched on at the end of the lesson so we stayed on for an extra half hour. I’m not sure if what caused Ethan’s melt down was that he was so excited he didn’t want to leave or the fact that he was overtired from all of his playing that morning but he didn’t want to get dry and dressed to leave so I just let him cry it out whilst I got ready, he let me get him ready in the end.
I think we are both looking forward to next weeks lesson…
