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Pad Patter: 5/27 Can u swim? do you?

AnneofAlamo

AnneofAlamo

Slippers IN sunshine? Even better!
Joined
Aug 30, 2009
Messages
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It is officially hot here in the high mountain desert of New Mexico!
We are breaking the heat with the pool. All our kids, we really pushed learning to swim.
I seriously am amazed how many people I run across that don't swim because they don't know how!
Ya'll swimmers? fish or
no way?
:yesss
 
I had to learn to swim because I was applying to be a flight attendant at the age of 18...
 
dh, dd, and myself are fish. love to swim & snorkel
ds on the other hand - we are making him take swimming lessons this summer (he will be 6 in 2 weeks), dd begged for them at 4.
 
Definitely fishes in our family! We had our kids take lessons when they were two. They learned how to hold their breath, swim across pool, and various other exercises. Very important!
 
I learned to swim in middle school/high school. I was lucky enough to go to schools that had their own pools, so swimming was a normal part of the gym class rotation. Learned about survival swimming, all the good stuff. The gym I joined has a pool and I'm anxious to get in and swim some laps.

Hidden talent: I can float like crazy for hours. I have always been able to do it, even when I was less buoyant (aka skinnier). I can lie on my back and just hang out in a pool without the need for any kind of floatation device. My DH on the other hand...sinks like a rock and can't float to save his life.
 
I can swim although I don't do more than float around when we go to the pool. My kids both love to swim though, so we are there pretty regularly in the summer month.
 
yes, i can. it's not my favorite activity, but my DD LOVES swimming (is on swim team) so I have learned to like the water more than I used to. :) It's not the water I have the issue with, so much as having to wear a bathing suit! :giggle We spend a lot of time at the pool in the summer.

Our pool went under a huge renovation over the winter and was set to open on Saturday, but a section of pipe in the OLD part of the pool broke, and it hasn't opened yet. =( I hope it gets fixed soon!
 
I love swimming! I was on the swim team in high school and am a total fish.. I insisted our boys take lessons, so we started our oldest (now 6) when he was about 18 months.. The 2yo starts next week, and we're all very excited.. :)
 
I grew up around lakes,rivers,swimming holes and the like. Not sure when or how I learned to swim bc we never had lessons. I just remember always knowing how and being pretty comfortable in the water. My mother is a fish and loves the water. My dad has a crazy phobia of the water. He will not get into water past his ankles. It is ironic that he is not a swimmer and worked more than 20 years on offshore oil rigs.

Currently, we spend most of our summer in our pool and my kids love the water. We also have a community pool that we frequent during the summer, as well as an occasional trip to the lake while visiting my dad. All of that to say that my kids are comfortable in the water, but I still worry like crazy while we are swimming.
 
I had all the childhood diseases possible in multiples by the age of 6 with the colds and suchlike that wouldn't go away for ages so my Granny decided I needed to do something for the immune system, and drinking chlorine (i.e. signing up for the pool) was an obvious choice back in the 80s, by the age of 13 I was offered a place in the sports school, to accommodate my training, as I swam a kilometer before school for a warm up and then 3-4 times a week 3 or 5 km depending on what we were training for. I was never the first, always the second in the competitions, though I swam against up to 4 years my senior. I then had a trauma of the knee at 15 that meant 4 months in a cast, thrust up in a harness, and then no walking, and no water sports, so since then it was just paddling. Now for a couple of years I had restarted swimming as we live in a village with the pool, and both my dh and I take part in an annual crossing of Lake Lugano (2,5 km) I am dreadfully slow, I think I was over an hour last year, but can't wait for the weather to improve to swim again.
 
We are all good swimmers here but it's partly because I have an unhealthy fear of drowning (for my kids, not me). I think it stems from training in Florida where every other PICU bed was filled with a near-drowned child. I HATED the thought of my kids around water and refused to get a pool.

And, I made them all learn early (although admittedly not as early as 2). We now have a pool in my "new" house and it was almost a deal breaker for me. I was a NAZI, with 2 fences, bells over the doors, etc, LOL. And they could ALL swim by the time we moved in.

Since then, I've settled down. Some. And the pool gets used almost every day from May through September. In fact, my kids are in the pool right now. Yes, I'm sitting out here with them instead of cleaning my dirty kitchen from dinner. Totally worth it.

Interestingly, my babysitter of over 10 years cannot swim and she is in her mid 50's. No one is allowed out in the back when she is here ;) and all is good.
 
Jen said:
Hidden talent: I can float like crazy for hours. I have always been able to do it, even when I was less buoyant (aka skinnier). I can lie on my back and just hang out in a pool without the need for any kind of floatation device. My DH on the other hand...sinks like a rock and can't float to save his life.
Click to expand...

My son has never mastered floating and he's 17! I think it's his lack of body fat lol. He's played tennis for years and he's all muscle. Oh, to have that problem...

I'm a fish. My husband cannot swim. My Aunt taught my brother and I in their pool over one summer when we went to visit her in FL. I did swim team for a short while in elementary school too. My son took lessons at 6 and my daughter is taking lessons this summer. We live near a lot of lakes and I think it's important to know how to handle an emergency situation, knock on wood, should it ever happen. Since May there have been 12 deaths on lakes where we live. People panic and sink and that is scary.

I hate the heat and being near the water is about the only way I can stomach being outside in it lol.
 
We are all fish here, too. We live at the pool, beach, and lakes in the summer so all my kids learned when they were really young.
 
I grew up waterskiing, so learning to swim was a must. I don't swim much now, but my kids love to go to the pool. My oldest is 11 and isn't a great swimmer, but he wants to get better. Funny... he can't float either! My youngest is 5 and has absolutely ZERO interest in swim lessons right now. He is afraid to put his face/head in the water, which is of course required to pass to the next level of lessons. He's been a guppy for two years now.
 
I'm a fish. I really don't know why I didn't swim competitively when I was young. My boys are all swimmers. I made them take lessons early, but my husband never learned to swim even though I had him take lessons as an adult. Because of that, we don't do a lot of water activities as a family. If it had been up to me, we'd have a pool in our yard, a boat, etc. I do take deep water aerobic classes during the summer here, but that's about the extent of my swimming (other than floating in a pool)
 
I can, but I don't enjoy it. I force myself to get in and swim a mile every few months, not sure why. I always say I'm going to do triathlons, but it never happens.

None of my kids have had formal lessons, but most can do ok since we have an above ground pool.
 
Fish in our house as well! I was a lifeguard at the end of high school, and to take that class my mom said I had to swim across a lake we visited every summer when I was 14. I swam across.... and back. lol! My Dad followed in a rowboat to make sure I'd be ok. It was about a mile or so. After my lifeguarding course, I became a swim instructor for the YMCA for a bunch of years. I taught anywhere from 12 mos to 14 years. It was a lot of fun!

My kids take lessons every summer when at camp. I tried teaching them, but it was better learning from someone else. My oldest is pretty good, and the youngest is learning his strokes. They LOVE the water. Between the town pool, friends pools, and the NJ shore... we are always near water and swimming.
 
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i can. not great at it, but i can. i'm more of a lie on raft kinda girl. & a cool drink in hand is even better.
 
We can all swim here. I'm like Jen, I have a total fear of my kids drowning. When we moved into our current house it had a pool. It needed some expensive work done to it though and instead of fixing it, we filled it in. It took up our entire backyard and now we have nice grass and a patio that we use all year long, so we haven't regretted it at all. Besides, we live a mile from Lake Michigan and ride our bikes down to the beach all the time, so it was silly to have a pool too. We started our boys in swim classes at 6 months old and by a year old my oldest could swim pretty darn good. It was so cute!
 
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