Gerry and the swimming lesson

Gerry recently started to learn how to swim. We enrolled in the weekend course at Stanford Swim School (the site is chinese only so don't bother clicking if you can't read chinese) which seems to be quite a popular and semi-famous locally. They also ban photo's at the swimming pool as they have a lucrative side business of providing photo's of your kids with the swim instructor...

Anyway, Gerry's been to several lessons now. The first lesson initially started well. Despite one of the other kids in his class crying severely, he wasn't phased at all and really enjoyed himself in the pool. At this point, I have to admit that the class is quite well run. There are quite a lot of instructors to keep an eye on the kids and the instructors seem to be quite experienced in dealing with children as well.

Unfortunately, near the end of the first lesson, things took an unfortunate turn. While the instructors were gathered together and chatting (I guess about what they were going to do next), Gerry slipped and fell into the water. Luckily, the pool isn't deep so he was able to stand up on his own. However, he swallowed a mouthful of water and together with him falling under the water, he became really scared and ended up crying for the rest of the lesson. This happened so quickly that I only saw the after effect - I didn't actually see him slip into the water. In hindsight, this may have been a good thing as I can only imagine how terrified I would have been to see him fall!

As he got out of the pool, all he could say was that he was very scared and didn't want to go swimming anymore. For the rest of the week, everytime we mentioned the prospect of swimming, he would repeat that he had fallen into the water and didn't want to swim anymore as he was scared.

Despite this, we still took him along to the second lesson. Which promptly resulted in him crying the whole time and ultimately, us leaving early as there was no way he could stay for the whole lesson. We had a chat with the instructor and they allowed us to change over to the parent accompanied class (which was rather nice of them as the class was actually full).

And so we spent the whole of the next week telling Gerry not to be scared as mummy would go with him into the pool. Despite this, he still didn't want to go swimming. In fact, this time, he started crying as soon as we got to the swim school. Nevertheless, we decided to soldier on - after all, the course fees had been fully prepaid...

And as expected, he was crying the whole time that we were changing him into his swimsuit. As the missus took him to the pool, he was extremely reluctant (even more so than in the second lesson). In the end, the missus had to physically pick him up and carry him into the pool. At this point, I expected him to really kick up a fuss but instead, he just stood in the pool and cried. If anything, this shows how scared he must have been of slipping and falling under the water again.

The instructor brought over some toys and let him play with mummy. Credit where credit is due - the missus did a great job of playing with Gerry and making him forget that he was afraid of swimming. After around 5 minutes, you could see Gerry laughing and having fun just standing there and playing with mummy in the pool.

Next weekend is my turn to go into the pool with Gerry. Lets hope I can do as good a job as the missus!