Tomorrow is Ashlee's second last swimming lesson. She started swimming about three months ago. Seeing as we've been moving around so much, she hasn't been in any formal type of preschool since we left Swakopmund. On the farm it didn't seem neccessary, she had so much to experience that a school would have seemed obsolete, the farm education was worth alot. And since moving to Windhoek I wanted to give her (and me) a last little window at home to pretend and sleep late and watch movies and go to have strawberry juice and go shopping with mummy. But the swimming was something routine, something necessary as we've been living in a house with a pool, and we had to get her to learn at least what to do if she fell in....
And it was traumatic. Ashlee is a stubborn little character, and she was vocal with her teacher Alex. She screamed so hard for two months that I had to sit in a separate room. And she came to assocaite the lessons with her dearly treasured swimming costume, aka her Koin Swimming ( from auntie Karen she calls Koin, from way across the sea). She didn't want to go anywhere near her costume, even at home. As soon as we hit the dirt road towards the swimming pool, she started a tirade of pleading, crying, begging, negotiating, to leave and got back home to Maria and Natty. But after the lesson she always gave her teacher a high five and said "teacher's nice." So we soldiered through for two and a half months, and she learnt to swim pretty well. Then last week I prepared myself for the same old, but instead, when we reached the usual freakout spot, she looked out of the window, sighed and said "first swimming, then go home." She put on her Koin swimming herself, without a word, and went to fetch her teacher from the office. And swam like a fish, without a sound, for half an hour. i was astounded, she had finally made her breakthrough and realised that some things in life are routine, you gotta do them, mummy will always be there to fetch you, and they aren't actually that bad. Growth!
No comments:
Post a Comment