Learning to Swim

So we decided to finally stop talking about it and got The Boy some swimming lessons.

Almost five years old now, he towers height-wise among kids almost twice his age (see photo of him with a young Eminem at a local park, below). As a result of this, when he tries to keep up with them verbally or in many other respects, the age difference becomes frustratingly clear.

Nowhere has this been more evident than at the pool. As he navigates carefully around the shallow end, careful to never let his head slip below the waterline, kids half his size—often literally—go frolicking past, in front of and all around him. He still has a great time, but as a parent, it is limiting. And our best efforts have led him to have enough confidence to go into the water, but not enough to compel him to challenge his boundaries and take the plunge, as it were.

Thusly The Missus went forth and Googled up a local woman who gives classes in her back yard. After having established that this person had not left a trail of carnage behind her in previous swimming-related efforts, we engaged her services for an intense, five-day-a-week, two-week course.

Today will be day three.

His class is composed of himself and one other child, a boy who has just turned four, so the teacher-to-child ratio almost can’t be beat.

The teacher is an eighteen-year-old blue-eyed blonde, straight out of the Sears catalog, circa 1958.

She is also a freaking genius. In two half-hours, she’s talked our over-cautious shallow-end walker into going so far as dipping his head into the water, all the way up to the eyeballs. She’s already done more in 60 minutes than we’ve accomplished in two years.

It doesn’t hurt to have only a single other kid there to test himself against, without a whole bunch of rambunctious hooligans in the class to intimidate him with their jejune shenanigans. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

And according to The Missus, he’s even enjoying the museums, libraries and art galleries she’s taking him to while I work during the daytime.

So far, everything has worked out great for The Boy in Boise. 30 consecutive days of one-on-two, personal attention from the parental units (until school starts mid-August). A new best friend—his best ever, he asserted early in the bromance—swimming every day and a cool new school and new friends to look forward to meeting and making.

Oh, and it even has bugs!

Who wouldn’t want to be a boy in Boise in the summertime?