Teaching The Kids to Swim and Other Holiday Disasters

It’s such a beautiful day outside, we’ve skipped Spring altogether and landed squarely into Summer territory. Time for swimming lessons. The three littlies are enrolled in swim school once a week (forgot how expensive swim school is), and so today I thought it was such a beautiful day, and the kids are all on school holidays, well being a HPE teacher I would take my own children to the local pool and do a quick swim lesson with them. How HARD could it be?

Note to self: If I ever get one of these ideas float innocently into my skull in the next three years I give myself permission to shut down all power resources to the mainframe and send me into a coma for at least three hours until the idea passes itself into oblivion.

It wasn’t a total disaster. Not from the kids point of view. They loved it. They had so much fun smiling as they happily tried to drown themselves in front of me instead of listening to me and waiting their turn at swimming. It’s not that they didn’t have enthusiasm. Nope we had that in droves, in fact we were the happiest family there at the swimming pool. No what we made up for in enthusiasm we lacked in coordination and listening skills. When Mummy says “wait your turn” that secretly means she’ll have her eyes off you for a split second so now is the time to dive to the bottom of the pool and wait for her to rescue you. No really, they’ve figured me out.

So no more pool time without serious back up, and by that I mean olympic swim instructors and maybe the Bondi Rescue boys to keep an eye on the twins while I save their older brother. Luckily there were no sharks in the pool or they could have been on the endangered list (the sharks that is, not the twins).

Yesterday we took the kids to the beach and had an amazing time running in and out of the surf, playing in the sand, giggling at the seagulls. Today didn’t go so well. We live and learn. Took the eldest three horse riding this morning. It was their first real ride of a horse, and all up they didn’t do too badly. Might need some time to get used to the idea of riding and steering with their knees. This holidays I’m trying to get the kids outdoors more and enjoy life in as many activities as we can.

And so we’re back to cleaning the house for Spring. Washed all windows, resurfaced the kitchen table, did five loads of washing, cleaned the front bookshelf, and general clean out of things. It’s a big job having to do all this, but I guess it needs to be done.