Keeping my promise: No more swimming

Good morning, my little muffin.

There was a time, when you were five months old, when you
were yet to realise how much you hated swimming...

Today is the day where I normally post a portrait of you, and I promise I'll get to that. But at the moment I need to write to you about swimming. Before class yesterday, I said to you that if you don't want to do it anymore, we will stop. And so we are stopping.

You love the water – I know this. You love our times at the badi, splashing about in the kiddy pools, playing with the shower and the fountains, coming into the lake with me for a swim in the deep water, etc. And yet, despite having taken you to swimming lessons since you were three months old (the Australian in me is determined to ensure that you are a decent swimmer!), you absolutely hate swimming class. I don't say that lightly. There are not many things that you absolutely hate... in fact, the only thing I can think of right now is when I leave you at the krippe in the mornings (I hear that one day this will get better... this still makes me sad).

We had a break from swimming lessons over the summer, as I figured we'd both be spending a lot of time in the water anyhow, and I was right. But now we are back into it, and I paid for all of those swimming lessons up-front, thinking it would be a fun indoor thing to do as the weather closed in. We have been to two lessons now, and each time you are hysterically unhappy. Not just from the moment that I dunk you under the water (in fact we have not even managed to get to that stage in either of those lessons), which used to be the case when you were super little, but from the moment that your little toe touches the pool. You start screaming and screaming and kicking at me as hard as you can, throwing your head back with the biggest fattest tears rolling down your scarlet face, arching your back towards the closest edge of the pool that you can find. And it doesn't get better. You are like this the entire time.

I don't know what it is about the classes that you hate, my love. I know it's not that you don't like being around other children. I know it's not that you don't enjoy the water. Perhaps it is the actual class environment... perhaps you are learning that as soon as you are in a pool and there appears to be a lesson of some kind, you will be pushed into doing things you don't want to. You will be made to go underwater when this is something you abhor.

We are doing this for fun, my love. I know that you are not hungry, not tired, not teething (!), not sick. You just hate it. So I am keeping my promise to you.

We will keep going to the pool, my darling. Just you and me, though, without any lessons, and we will do everything at your own pace. You let me know what you are ready for. Perhaps I will buy you some goggles and that will make going underwater more fun... perhaps. Or perhaps you'll hate them... who knows.

As long as you know that I love you. I love the little socks off you!

Love Mummy.

Photos by Olga Bushkova