Summer of Sports: End of Summer Swim Report

We’re winding down our summer of sports around here. Last week Calvin came for the last swimming lesson of 2011, and he stayed afterwards for our annual celebratory meal together, wrapping up our fourth year (!!!) of swimming lessons with our beloved Calvin.

The funny thing about Calvin is that he’s not a swimming teacher, per se (he only teaches our kids), rather he is simply an awesome alum of collegiate-level swimming (nationally ranked NCAA). He was the captain of the Lehigh swim team and has been a competitive swimmer his whole life. So, it is only natural that he’s been teaching our kids not just swimming, but competitive racing swimming. The result is that our kids are doing things in the water that they’d probably never be doing with more “normal” swim lessons.

The boys, at the end of their 7-year-old summer, continue to amaze us with their skills in the pool. They do all the strokes beautifully, including the butterfly (my favorite to watch them do since in my mind that was always a stroke for only the most serious of swim racers). They are awesome divers, and are particularly adept at racing dives. They do beautiful flip turns inside the walls of the pool. They can swim the length of the pool underwater now (not just the width). And this summer they mastered the art of treading water. Their favorite thing to do is race each other (they go back and forth in terms of who wins).

Meera, at the end of her 3-year-old summer, and her first summer of swim lessons with Calvin, has surprised us with her love of the water and her daredevil antics in the pool. We had thought that Kyle and Owen were just super unusual in their agility in the pool, but Meera (crazily enough) seems to show many of the same traits (we’re still trying to wrap our minds around that). She’s not nearly as strong as Kyle and Owen were at her age, but she’s just as fearless. Which is kinda scary. At this point she is fully swimming (doggy paddle with strong kicking), can turn in any direction under water swimming, jumps off the edge of the pool into any depth, and has mastered the arts of both holding her breath under water (for long stretches of time) and blowing bubbles.

Our pool will stay open until the end of September, but our swimming time will decrease greatly once school starts, and swimming lessons are all done. We’ll miss our “Calvin Days”… until next summer!