Archive for December 13th, 2006
Water Babies
All through the summer, each Sunday, the whole family plus a volunteering god-, or grand-, parent would drive over to a private school on the other side of Leeds. Each adult would take a baby and change them and the girl in question into swimwear and for an hour we would try to teach them to swim.
Everyone’s heard about how babies hold their breath automatically if they’re submerged in water but actually doing the submerging is a rather frightening affair. Especially towards the end of the course where we moved on from mere dunking to dunking and letting go. Nothing I’ve experienced since become a father (or possibly even beforehand) has combined awe and terror so completely. Watching your child float, arms outstretched, eyes wide beneath the surface of the pool is magical but as much as my rational side told me it was perfectly safe – thousands of babies take these classes every week – my irrational side would be hollering words to the effect of “Arrgh! Your baby’s in the water! No! Save her! She’ll drown! Get her out! GET HER OUT!” from the recess of my mind I was trying to banish it to.
I can only imagine what my reaction might have been had we proceeded to enroll in the second 12 weeks of the course, at the end of which parents stand at the side of the pool and drop their baby in so the baby can turn under water, swim back to the side and hold on. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the only dad to jump in, too, just in case.
These classes brought home some of the difficulty of life with triplets. Unlike every other family there, we always needed a volunteer to swim with one of our girls which, due to holidays and other commitments meant that our girls couldn’t swim with the same person each week. On the other hand, of course, it did mean that both me and Jan could always join in, never being relegated to the poolside to watch like half of the singleton parents were. And it was nice for others to be able to join in with such an intimate activity, to share a little of the magic.
Anyway, the reason I’ve posted about our swimming lessons is that we just got the photo of all three girls underwater. Hats off to the photographer for managing to get a shot this good.
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