When our children were young, it was super important to us for me to stay home with our kids, at least as much as possible. I worked from our home three to four days a week cutting wood for painting classes and took all the supplies needed for the painting classes two days and two nights a week. Their grandma would watch them Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and a friend that lived close would watch them for about an hour those two evenings until my husband could pick them up.
One summer I dropped my three year-old daughter and fifteen month-old toddler off at our friends apartment. We were chatting as my son was playing with a ball. He dropped the ball, and rolled into the apartment’s swimming pool, where the ball was floating about two feet away. Before any of us realized what was happening, my toddler decided to chase his ball. We heard a splash, and the next thing we knew, he was standing on the bottom of the pool. My stomach sank! I grabbed my daughter while the babysitter jumped in and grabbed him. As I tearfully held my baby, he cried and neither of us wanted to let go of each other. At that moment, I decided that I would sign both of my kids up for ‘Mommy and Me’ swimming classes.
In a ‘Mommy and Me class’, toddlers through preschoolers learned to jump in the water from the side of the pool into mom’s arms, swim back to the side of the pool, and crawl out of the pool. It was more about survival and safety than about learning to swim with the proper form. My goal in this class was to make sure that if either of my kids went into any kind of water, they could get out safely. The next Monday, my mom met me at the local high school and would watch my son while I was in the pool with my daughter for 45 minutes while she learned to swim. The kids would eat a snack then while my mom played with my daughter, I would hold my son in the water for 45 minutes while he would scream his head off, clinging to my neck for dear life. This poor child was deathly afraid of the water. He didn’t want anything to do with the water, holding his breath, much less hanging out in a pool. After four days of screaming and clinging to my neck, I peeled his arms off me… I held him high in the above the water while I went under water and blew bubbles. He thought that was the funniest thing. The next week his teacher and I got him to blow bubbles under water. Getting him over his fear of water was hard, but worth every moment of him screaming in my ear.
During the 2 weeks of classes, the teacher let the kids have some fun, by giving some of the ‘advanced kiddos’ an opportunity to “jump” off the diving board. When the kids ‘jumped’ off the diving board, we would walk the little ones to the end of the diving board and drop them into the water where the swim teacher awaited. After being dropped a few times, some of the kids would run and jump off the diving board, where someone was treading water to make sure these toddlers and preschoolers swam safely to the ladder and got safely out of the pool. It took most of the second week to get most of the little ones to take advantage of this. My son was the only kid in his class that went from screaming at the top of his lungs to jumping off the diving board all by himself. His teacher had never seen a kid make so much progress in two weeks. Both of our kids liked the classes so much, we signed up for more classes that summer. None of us could believe that in 2 short weeks our one-year old son went from falling in a pool, to hating any kind of water, to the watersport loving person he still is today.
The day my son walked into that pool, I was a basket case. I was so scared of so many things. I feared either of my kids could fall in the pool again. I was afraid that after that trauma, neither of my kids would want to go in the water again. Most of all, I never wanted to leave my kids… ever again. I wanted to put them in a bubble and protect them from anything and everything. Going to work that evening was so hard. I couldn’t rely on my own strength, I had to trust that the Lord was in control and my kids were in good hands.
‘I sought the Lord, and He answered me; He delivered me from my fears.’ Psalm 34:4
