Michael Phelps in the Making

Yesterday was our fourth water babies swim class- the half way mark of the very intensive course ;)

Niall is growing leaps and bounds, kicking and splashing and swallowing buckets of water in an attempt to blow bubbles-- I'm still confused as to why this instructor thinks that a bunch of 6-12 month olds can follow any kind of instruction, never mind pursing their little lips into a perfect circle and blowing as they are dunked below the surface.

This guy literally said "Alright, everyone. We're going to blow bubbles, ok?" All of the parents just look at each other, thinking "Is he serious?" Sure, I'll just explain to Niall that we're supposed to be blowing bubbles right now.  The instructor can't be more than 20 years old, so I'm guessing he doesn't really have a clue what this age group is really capable of. That's understandable, though; before I had a baby, I asked a co-worker if her 2 month old was crawling yet. It's difficult to gauge what infants and toddlers can do if you're not around them too often.

I guess it was nice to finally try something different, though. I'm not really sure what I expected going into the class- I realize that he's not going to be doing the butterfly stroke at the end of all this, but I'm getting a little tired of doing the same thing every single time. It usually ends up being more of a crazy intense arm work out for me than a swim lesson for Niall.

We always start by bouncing the babies from knee to knee in the shallow end for a good 10 minutes, then we sit them on the wall and let them fall into our arms, and then finish with ring around the rosie, bobbing them up and down... draining me of whatever little bit of strength was left in my arms.

It was really fun the first couple of times, but then I started getting the feeling that the instructor did absolutely nothing to prepare for these classes and just kind of made things up as he went along... which explains why he would pause for long periods of time and say "let's do that first thing again," realizing there were still 15 more minutes left of the 30 minute class.

All that really matters is that Niall is getting used to the water, so that's a good thing. And he's finally warming up to Marcus, so that's a great lesson I wasn't even expecting for Niall to get out of this whole thing.