My swimming baby

Today Tricia resumed her swimming class after months of hiatus due to the raining season end of last year and my busy travelling schedule early this year. I initially planned to cancel her classes because I felt it went nowhere. I didn't see much improvement in my baby's skills / her progress was quite slow. It was not so much on HER development but more on the way the class was structured. After a couple of months attending the classes, I felt like there weren't that much progress. We were learning more or less the same things. So I thought maybe I should hire a personal trainer instead, who can focus solely on my baby than a bunch of babies, following MY schedule and at a nearer location to my place. 

However, when I went for her replacement class end of last month, her teacher Bryan told me that this year, they will structure the classes differently. The payment will have to be made upfront, ie RM500 for 10 classes and you have to attend your own assigned class rather than simply walking in to any class for replacement. At the end of each semester, there will be 4 replacement classes for you to attend. This way, he said, the classes could progress from one step to the other rather than trying to catch up the old syllabus for those who missed the classes. One good point. Then he was rather flexible on the schedule. I said I would be travelling a lot in January/February so can I not take the whole 10 classes. Instead just take probably half of the classes. He initially said no, because the classes would progress from the beginning so if I joined halfway I would have missed the first few lessons so he advised I just join next semester. Then he paused for awhile and thought, Tricia had already attended the first few lessons so he said, sure why not. Two brownie points for teacher Bryan so I decided to give it a go and today... at the first lesson after so long, I was glad I did.

Firstly, I was happy when told they have resumed the 10 o'clock class for babies. Before this they cancelled the 10 o'clock class and only offered 9am and 9.30am. 1 thing for sure, we always wake up late on weekends. And the freaking pool is in Shah Alam so it takes at least 40 minutes of driving there from Bangi even when we drive at full speed. Secondly, today there was no one else in our class so we did get teacher Bryan's full attention. Thirdly, I was so happy that today teacher Bryan did multiple submerge sessions with Tricia and I got to see her starting to swim. He would make her jump into the pool and asked hubby to move further behind before catching her. Fourthly, I was so happy to see that Tricia did not cry and teacher said she did not struggle or panic when he held her in the water. Her body reaction said she was very calm. And finally, I was very happy with teacher Bryan because he not only sings nursery rhymes better than we do, he also explains things to us and understands babies very well too. He told us when we did the conditioning, we could see that Tricia was opening her mouth (looked like she was gagging). But she was not breathing that time, she was actually holding her breath. Try to do it yourself... Open your mouth and you can feel that the throat will actually close. And then, when we try to make her lie down flat on the surface of the water, making sure her ears were dipped into the water, she struggled to sit up. Teacher Bryan suggested for us to sing her favourite bedtime song so both of us started singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Tricia felt so weird that we started singing that song in the middle of the public pool that instead of struggling, she looked at us curiously and then she was calm and struggled less. It worked. I was so happy today. =D

On the way back, I was holding her in the car, then I heard her counting "one, two, three". Hah. At 15 months. I'm so proud. ^_^