The Little Tot that Could: Survival Swim Lessons

At one year old my daughter could float. In fact, you could flip her into the air and have her land upside down, and she’d pop right back up a few seconds later, smiling. This skill is enormously important to me. We just spent a week of practicing every day to get her back where she was before the winter months of no swimming. Today while standing at the edge of the pool steps I was proud to hear her say, “If me fall into water me go to me float.” I have no idea where she gets the "me’s" from. I assure you I do use the words “I” and “my” in front of my children. Two year olds have crazy words come out of their mouths and crazy ideas in their heads—all the more reason they need to know how to float.

The sad puppy stage.

Every time I go to a public pool people stare in awe at her and also at my son, who went through the same routine and now at age four swims pretty well. They want to know how we did it. I smile politely and tell them it is quite simple: you pick up a side job to pay for very expensive special swim lessons that require documentation of all your child's eating and pooping habits and attendance five days a week for a minimum of four weeks. (I might be exaggerating. I also used the extra cash from that babysitting job to fund hayrides and overpriced ice cream at fall festivals, a trip to an overpriced zoo, approximately 100 under-priced children’s books at the thrift store, and various other things significantly more frivolous than swim lessons.) ISR Self-Rescue Swim Lessons are no joke, but of course neither is the reason for needing them.

In Florida there seems to be water everywhere. A large percentage of residents own pools. There is the ocean, lakes, rivers, and the springs. All over my town there are large drainage ponds and in the summer the ditches can be filled to the brim. I don’t really want to write about the reason we decided to do the lessons. We had a scary experience that turned out alright. With little kids, accidents happen instantly. Fortunately, little kids recover emotionally from a scare very quickly. The same can’t be said for me. That trauma will always linger.

These lessons teach infants as young as six months old to float. Every morning we were allotted a ten minute slot to come ready to hop in. I had to track everything my child ate the twenty-four hours prior to the lesson as well as the bowel movements. The children are not allowed to eat two hours before a lesson, which is surprisingly inconvenient for a toddler. No dairy, apple, or peach anything is allowed twenty-four hours prior to the lesson, as it makes them spit up. These lessons taught me that Americans think eggs are dairy. Who knew? Eggs come out of a chicken’s butt—not from a cow’s—but similar to cow products, they do apparently make a kid upchuck his breakfast into the crystal blue waters of the instructor’s pool. Whoops.

Reading what I just wrote, I’m starting to make these lessons sound like torture sessions. Based on how you can hear the kids crying as soon as you pull into the instructor’s driveway, I could see how someone could make that mistake. The instructor is one of those people that has never seen an ugly baby. I have, so I can’t relate. She is a lovely person, and treated each child as her own, gently swirling them around in the water and urging them to reach out for toys. Despite the very gentle progression of the lessons, a child put into the arms of a stranger in a huge blue abyss is scared, at least at first. They all make this heartbreaking puppy sounding whimper. It is not fun to watch in the beginning, but it gets so much better. By the end of four weeks the kids almost universally love it, and it is wild to see their skills. Toddlers are taught the swim-float-swim process of swimming a little, then resting in their float, and continuing until reaching safety.

I learned to swim at the YMCA a block away from my house. My mom would walk me through the neighborhood on hot, sunny afternoons with a towel thrown over my shoulder. I distinctly remember seeing a squished squirrel that I almost stepped on in the road. I remember that poor squirrel better than I remember learning to swim. Of what I recall, I don’t think learning to float was a pivotal part of my swim education. Even as an adult, it may not have occurred to me in a desperate situation to just calm down and float. My children’s lessons have educated me quite a bit as well.

After a week spent in the pool, I have managed for the first time in years to have a white bathing suit tanned onto my skin. The kids are also wearing some intriguing farmer’s tans. I look forward to seeing our unique zebra stripes after the next few weeks of tweaking their skills. I smell like pool, and I like this smell. I went from seeing the pool as anxiety inducing, to seeing it as it was meant to be—fun.

If you have a little human, check out ISR.