Swimming with Tyler

I took Tyler swimming at the gym where Larisa is a member.  It’s a nice place.  This was our chance to spend some time together while Lydia was going to a birthday party.  Tyler was very excited about going swimming with me.

When we got there, showed me the way to the locker rooms (he tried to walk in the women’s room).  Then we went in to change and he got nervous about so many adults in there.  I really don’t know what the deal was, but he said he didn’t want to swim, or even change.  I changed first and then started undressing him, but he wouldn’t have it.  He said the pool was to scary, so he didn’t want to swim.

We walked over to see the pool, and I could tell he was intrigued to see all the kids swimming.  But his nerves were still uneasy.  When I forced him to undress, his last attempt was to not let me put his swim suit on.  He threw a big fuss and started crying.  An older man with his handicapped son talked to Tyler to calm him down.  I managed to trick him a little to put the suit on while he was distracted.  Then I made him budge an inch here and there---“let’s just go to the bathroom”---“let’s just come over here into the shower real quick”---until I had won.  Even as we were standing next to the pool he pretended he didn’t want to swim.  But once I started carrying him in he didn’t put up a fight.

He really loved it the whole time.  We swam for about an hour and 15 minutes.  He held on to a couple of noodles for a while and pretended to chase me around or swim away from me.  He was so energetic and happy the whole time.  It was a lot of fun.  He was proud to be at his “swimming lessons” (Lydia had lessons last summer), and he wanted to show everyone that he was swimming by himself.  After a while I managed to trick him into giving up the noodles for a floaty that strapped around his chest.  That freed up his arms.

We discovered that we could shoot water through the hole in the noodle.  At first I was showed him that it worked without making it obvious that I was doing the blowing.  The he went around shooting water in the air, and I followed to blow in the other end of the noodle.  I asked him how it worked.  He demonstrated.  Then I asked why it does that now and didn’t before.  He said that you have to squeeze the end like he was. :)

Then he decided to keep shooting me in the face.  Then it was a little more clear that I was blowing, but I wasn’t sure if it was registering with him.  I could tell he was still trying to squeeze the end to make it go.  But his smooth transition to reality surprised me.  At one point, after doing something else, he said, “let’s do the noodle again where I shoot water out and you blow.”  I was a little taken back and asked, “why should I blow?”---“So that the water comes out,” he responded.

On the way home he kept talking about how much fun we had.