Sara Plays House

Avery has been taking swimming lessons at the Y for the last four weeks.  We were planning for her to do dance this Spring, but then I mentioned swimming and she was all, “OMG MOMMY PLEASE I WANT TO SWIM OMGOMGOMG!  Did you know that fish swim?  I want to swim LIKE THAT.”  So we signed her up for swimming.  I’m sorry, Nana.  I really am!  There’s still hope for Zoe.  I’ll work on it.

Let me stop right here and remind you all that my child is not graceful.  She does not have an athletic bone in her body.  Gravity is not her friend.  As a matter of fact, gravity is almost always working against her.  She comes by it honestly though; I am the same way.  (Did you see me just use a semi-colon?  I know.)

I took swimming lessons once.  I was told to do “freestyle swimming”.  So I swam like a frog.  Because that’s what I liked.  And it was FREEstyle swimming, right?  After the instructor showed me how I was supposed to swim (for the record, a Front Crawl), I was totally over it.  Somehow I never had to go back.  My parents are awesome like that.

OK.  Back to Avery.  I wasn’t sure what to expect with swimming.  I thought that maybe, just maybe, being in the water would help her with that whole gravity thing.

I’m going to interject here that I love my daughter very, very much.  I am always there to pick her up after she falls.  Which is often.  Moving on.

She’s doing okay at swim class.  But I don’t believe she’s the next Dara Torres.  Avery has this problem in classes such as this.  The problem is that she gets SO EXCITED about it all that she can’t really listen to the instructor.  So she just kinda does her own thing.  She did this in ballet.  She did this in soccer.  I’m beginning to wonder if she’ll ever outgrow it.  So while all the other kids are laying flat and still to “float” with the teacher?  Avery is kicking as hard as she can.  Because hello?  She’s in the water!  Water is fun!  We show our excitement with lots and lots of movement!  Not lying still!  Lying still is BORING!

Tonight in class, one of their drills was to jump from the side of the pool into the instructor’s arms.  My ever-cautious child was the only one to sit down on the side and THEN thrust her little body into the pool.  When the teacher dunked her a few minutes later?  Avery was the only one who came up screaming.  Do you know why?  She was SO EXCITED about the dunking she had her mouth wide open.  Again, this is how we show our excitement!

But here’s the thing.  The whole time she’s in that pool, she’s smiling.  She’s bobbing up and down, laughing with the other kids, and having the best thirty minutes of her entire day.  She may never win a gold medal in, well, anything, but she does have fun.

As we were leaving the Y, she pointed at a large telephone tower across the street and exclaimed, “Mommy!  It’s the EIFFEL TOWER!  Is this France?”  And I was reminded that no matter what, she will always have that big beautiful brain to fall back on.

Really, she might totally fall on it.  Because the child can fall over just about anything.