Abby's Last Swim Lesson

Abby had her last swim lesson for the foreseeable future and I'm both sad and excited. I'm sad because she loves to swim, loves the water, and has been making great progress with her swim strokes. I mean my not-yet-4 year old was beginning to learn the dolphin kick. As an adult I can barely do that! Yet, at the same time I'm excited because it means we have our afternoons back to ourselves and the rush, rush, rush of getting to and from and after swim lessons is gone. When we first put Abby in swim lessons she was 2.5 (we sneaked her in early - their minimum age was 3 - because of her joy and fearlessness of being in the water) and her lessons were twice a week at 9:00am. This 9:00am time lasted all throughout the school year and even into summer. She started out as a Jellyfish learning to blow bubbles, bob, zoom, and other intro to water basics. By the end of the school year she'd graduated to the Star Fish class so summer saw her learning her front stroke, floating unassisted, and the monkey-tree-banana stroke of which I have no idea what it's really called.

Then this second year of swim lessons during the school year began and right away we ran into a stumbling block. With pre-school three mornings a week and Bible study one morning a week the morning swim lesson times were not a good match for us. This bumped us into the evening swim lesson times. We started the session with a 5:30pm time but quickly realized that this was a crazy time for us to try to get her to lessons by. Abby and I were eating dinner at 4:30pm and Nate wasn't eating dinner until closer to 7:00pm. Then there'd be a second dinner around 8pm because Abby was hungry again. So we switched to a 4:00pm swim lesson. This had its own hardships as I found myself having to wake Abby up from her naps early (which is always a joy) and it was a struggle and a fight to get her ready and out the door on time, all while her neighborhood friends were coming up and asking if she could come outside and play. So by the time the session came to to the last swim lesson I was more than ready to have an easier schedule and drop the lessons. Yet, on the last day I couldn't help but be a little sorry with our decision because of all the laughing I heard and the fun I saw. sigh. I know there are no wrong decisions here and that, for our family, quitting lessons at this time in our life is a good thing but I still wish we'd been able to work out times, finances, life in general to make it happen.

Since it was her last swim lesson I got lots of pictures and videos to show off how great she's been doing. Hopefully when we do summer swim lessons in a few months she won't have back-tracked to far in her swimming abilities!

Diving for Rings

Front Crawl and Side Stroke

Monkey-Tree-Banana (She's been saying "Monkey, Tree, Banana" as she swims each of the movements for a while now and it just cracks me up. My little ham!)