Silverfish!

Lucia's Spring Break this week, and we had kicked around a few ideas over the weekend about what we could go do. Naturally, we made a list, with Lucia dictating and me writing. Some of the items were more ambitious than others (I'm looking at you, massively huge and hilly Oakland Zoo), and some items couldn't happen because of logistics, but we tried to get in the others.

One thing we decided to focus on this week was swimming: we had a mere 16 makeup credits, as you know the cold/flu season hit us hard. Three makeup credits = a private lesson so I booked private lessons every day this week.

Monday was her first lesson. She did OK. Swimming in general has been a challenge in recent months; there was one week where the pool was a few degrees colder and she just bawled and bawled and they motioned for me to come down from the viewing gallery to get her. Since then, she has regressed and wanted to jack around and give her teacher a hard time. Ugh. We figured a week's worth of private lessons would help. And they did! Tuesday her teacher pushed her a bit, and voila, she took off like a rocket in the water. Afterwards I complimented him and he said he saw her jacking around on Monday and knew she was the kind of kid who needed a bit more of a push. That's our girl! Wednesday we had to cancel our lesson because we went to the doctor to check on baby brudder, but Thursday she was back in the water with the same teacher as Tuesday. And she ROCKED IT. It was unbelievable. He'd stand about 10 feet from the edge of the side, and just basically pick her up, put her face down, and let her take off, face fully in the water, kicking up a storm, arms pointed straight like an arrow. Over and over again. He had her stand on the side of the pool and she jumped in at least five times, something we've never seen her do. It was impressive. Afterwards I told her how proud of her I was, and told her how proud she should be of herself.

Yesterday we arrived, ready to rock it, but we had a substitute teacher who just thought Lucia was simply adorable, and basically let her walk all over her. From the viewing gallery I watched Lucia repeatedly splash her in the face, despite this teacher telling her to stop, and jack around and try to jump off the platform and swim like she had done the days prior. I asked another mom up there if she thought I should say anything, she said yes. I went downstairs and yelled across the pool for Lucia to stop splashing her teacher (she was still doing it! and the teacher was letting her!). I talked to them aside and said, look, she's acting up because you're not pushing her, and she should be evaluated today to see if she can move from Seahorse to Silverfish today. They said no probs, they didn't see that on her chart but would be happy to do so.

And they did! and here's video of her rocking it again! She's the blue blur at the top of the video, sorry for crappy quality. In that video she does monkey walks around the side of the pool, gets herself out, then "dives" from a sitting position. After class they said yes, she was ready to move up. Hooray! I had her apologize to the teacher for not stopping splashing when she asked and we talked about how that wasn't OK.

It was really important to me that she get in a win this week, and feel a sense of pride for her accomplishments before all hell breaks loose with the arrival of baby brudder next week. I've heard that she'll likely regress in some areas and will have a hard time adjusting in others. Let's hope the pride of this week can help her in some way.