I have a fish!

Okay, S3's been fairly skittish about the pool. He enjoys it, but he's rather clingy. I've been trying to build his confidence. He'll willingly go to his swim lesson - as long as it's his teacher. He refuses to get in the water if his aide isn't the one he sees. Once he sees her, off he trucks through the water with a smile on his face.

So today when we went as a family to go swimming, I introduced S3 to his monkeys. They are water wings with monkeys on them. He thinks the monkeys are pretty cool. Well, we started by wading in together. Then when it was deep enough I told him to try and kick. When he picked his feet up and he still floated, he thought that was pretty cool. Now, he's not a swimmer yet by any stretch of the imagination, but this time he didn't want me to hold him at all! He played a game of "catch" with S2 in the deeper section of the pool (the 3 to 4 foot deep area) for quite a while. And then when we needed to follow S1 to the deeper section, S3 wanted to do it by himself, trying to kick and use his arms to get around. When we were close to the edge S3 would climb out at the ladder and then sit down and slide back into the pool again all on his own. Then he would "swim" to get a ball or just away from the wall, turn around and go back again. When we had to follow S1 back to shallower waters, S3 pointed back to the deep end and said, "Go back over there!" So, now that he's discovered freedom and can "swim" like his brothers, he wants to keep doing it.

I do have to stay close because although he does pretty well with keeping his mouth closed or spitting water out, there were a couple of times when I had to hold him up until he could cough it out and catch his breath, but then off he went again. After just over an hour we left the pool and although we only live a block away, S3 was asleep in the stroller before we got home! Heck, he even slept through getting his swim clothes off and a dry diaper. And no, he's not dead, I can hear him breathing just fine. I am just so happy because here I thought I was going to have a scaredy cat of the water and it was going to make it so much harder to take all three of the them to the pool by myself. This is much more fun.