Growing up I spent my summers in the water. Whether it was in the pool or on the lake, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in the water, and I certainly can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim.
With all that said, I don’t need my kids to be the next Michael Phelps, but I want my kids to love the water as much as I do, and in order to do that we’ve got to learn how to be safe while we’re doing it.
And that’s where Goldfish Swim School comes into play.
I originally started bringing Miri to Goldfish when she was just 5 months old for mommy and me swim class. Then Azi in fetus form happened, and it was too much for me to continue to take her. I also started to look like a whale, and I didn’t want to scare the other kids/splash out all of the pool water.
So another year and a half goes by, Miri just turned 2, and I decided that I wanted to enroll her in swim lessons again. Goldfish is great because it’s one of the only facilities that allows independent kid lessons before the age of 3, and I need this because I had Azi now and couldn’t logistically get in the water with Miri.
The first few lessons were rough, to say the least. The staff is amazing, and we especially love Miri’s teacher Miss Karla, but she had never done an activity without me right beside her before, so there were definitely some tears. Through the patience of the staff, and some praying, Miri finally started to have fun in the class, she even made a friend!
After a few months of Goldfish, I was still concerned that if Miri fell in a pool she wouldn’t know what to do. So, at one of the only times when my Mother’s Intuition hasn’t been right, I moved Miri to a different swim school that shall remain nameless here.
The new school had it’s positives, which included pushing Miri a bit more out of her comfort zone to try and make progress, but also it’s negatives, which were that this philosophy of “tough love” simply wasn’t what Miri needed. She started to cry every lesson, even to the point of vomiting. She wasn’t even 2.5 yrs old at the time this was all happening, and even though I was excited to see the progress she was making, it wasn’t worth the crying and the anxiety it was causing M.
Home is where the heart is…
So one afternoon, I came crawling back to Goldfish with my tail between my legs, and I sat down with Sara, the manager at the Evanston location, and our teacher, Miss Karla, and we just had a very frank conversation about why I left, what happened, and how we were going to work together to get Miri back on track without the swimming anxiety.
As a first-time mom, I had never had a “problem” with any of my daughter’s activities before, so I didn’t know that the best way to approach the situation in the first place would have been to simply talk to the coach and higher up about my overall concerns. In retrospect, I 100% should’ve stayed at Goldfish, and tried to work out my concerns there. Because of the switch, she had some serious regression, and we basically had to start from the ground up, with her swim lessons, when we came back to Goldfish.
Almost 3 months after being back at Goldfish, we couldn’t be happier. It’s still a work in progress to get Miri to float on her back and to have confidence in the water, but she’s excited to go, which is the most important thing. And she’s learning life-saving skills; I just have to realize that every kid learns and progresses at their own pace. I could not be more grateful to Goldfish Swim School Evanston for their friendliness when we walk in every week, their willingness to accommodate even the craziest moms and their true love and passion for teaching kids how to swim. After trying out another school and then switching back to Goldfish, I think it’s clear that we think the philosophy at Goldfish Swim School has got the #ScienceofSwimPlay down pretty good, and I can’t wait to watch Miri continue to grow and learn there. And who knows? You may see M in the Olympics a few years down the road.
Leave a Reply