Baby boot camp

This week I felt like Melina's swim school was a little too militaristic. There was a new teacher (hopefully a sub) who was just a little too hard core - after all, these are one year olds, and it's not like they HAVE to learn to swim by age two. She had them repeat an exercise where they swim from their parent to the wall five times in a row, which was way too many for Melina's taste. Also, Melina has decided that she HATES the blue noodles they use to float the babies around the pool. This is probably because she slipped down between the noodles and went underwater, where I grabbed her a little too roughly and freaked her out. I don't know if she will put up with the noodles at all next week. On the positive side, she is starting to jump into the pool voluntarily and is definitely holding her breath when we do the underwater hokey pokey.

All in all I have mixed feelings about the swimming classes. Since most of the other kids took the infant class, they are more comfortable in the water than Melina, but the sub, at least, did not take that into account and didn't even ask about Melina's swimming experience. There's also not much explaining of theory or why we're doing certain things or, well, anything at all. There's no explaining. I'm not sure if we'll re-enroll her when this term is up; I guess I'll have to see if she's enjoying it by then. At least now she knows to hold her breath underwater - that's a step in the right direction.