Swimming buddies
Usually at swimming it’s packed and chaos in the changing rooms. The school pool we use is great, but the changing rooms are about the size of my kitchen.
There’s 10 in our Water Babies class usually, and with 30 minute lessons there’s usually a little overlap of people before or after. Thankfully on Saturdays, there’s only 2 classes at our pool so no stress like that. With growing toddlers, and mums it can be a tight squeeze sometimes, even if, like our class, there’s 2 or 3 days so a few less in the female changing room.
I find the changing room dynamics quite interesting. Our old classes on Fridays had a really chatty crowd of mums, and we all had a really good rapport in and out of the pool. The current Saturday class is very quiet in comparison especially now the one really chatty person has moved to another class. It’s taken a whole term before we’ve all had a general conversation together pre-class.
Today it seemed like the toddlers had taken over in the chatty stakes, becoming real swimming buddies.
T walked in and straight away starts saying hello to everyone, hello J, hello N. Really cute. Then J starts.There’s waving between them too. N decides to just watch – he’s usually the chatty one, but he wasn’t quite sure of this friendliness at first. I think he was getting into his ‘zone’ for the lesson.
We went out to sit and watch the end of the baby lesson before ours. T was sitting next to us chatting away to his dad and N. N was just enthralled watching in silence. He didn’t seem too worried seeing them all doing their underwater swims (not one cried, unlike how N used to be).
It’s like he’s an elite athlete, mentally preparing himself in silence…then as soon as we get the nod to get in the pool, he’s off his seat and almost dragging me to the edge so we can get in. It’s great to see him enjoying it, and now he doesn’t get upset at anything – holding on, doing bits on his own, jumping in, mat play, underwater swims, going to the teacher. He’s not keen at some parts, but he’ll do the activities, even if it’s his version of them.
I do wonder how much water he swallows though. We were working on body position today and adding in breathing (so, bubbles and then breathing). He blows bubbles when practicing, but most of the time he’s swimming round with his mouth wide open gulping in water. Mind you, he drinks bathwater, so a swimming pool’s the same to him!
Afterwards it’s back to the changing rooms…with all the toddlers (except N who hates them) fighting their parents to stay under the showers.
If you get the right swimming class, it’s a great opportunity to make friends…we’re still friends with people from our first swimming class even though they only went for a short while. Hopefully some from this class will become friends too and N will have some more friends outside nursery and NCT.