Apr
20
Seattle is flirting with spring. One day is lush and sunny, the next scowling and drizzling. Everything is covered with a fine dusty coating of pollen, and the patio is littered with sticky yellow seed pods that cling to the bottoms of toddler-sized shoes and get trampled into the carpet. It feels moistly, thickly alive outside, like the air itself is bursting with unfurling blooms and delicate reaching green tendrils. The branches are trading their fierce skeletal winter bones for whorls of leaves and pink-tipped buds. We spread mulch in our front lawn and the smell is rich and fertile and organic, like the clean bedding of warm-blooded creatures.
It is a lovely transformation, accompanied by a nonstop energetic orchestra of singing birds, but here is the important thing: WE CAN THROW THE LOUD, RAUCOUS-ASS CHILDREN AND THE FARTING, FUR-SHEDDING DOG OUTSIDE NOW.
Glory, glory. Hallelujah.
Apr
15
I have this fancy task management application that I sometimes use but mostly ignore, and it’s had a to-do item in there for, I don’t know, maybe a year or more, filed away in the “Kids” project under a folder titled “Teach Riley to swim”. The first action item in this carefully-organized project was “Call swimming center re: lessons”.
And there it’s sat for all these months, which is my main problem with fancy task management software applications: they lack the one mission-critical feature I need, which is for a tiny boot to emerge from my computer and give me a swift kick in the ass.
Meanwhile, Riley not only didn’t learn how to swim, but he got pretty scared of water in general. I don’t mean the bathtub, but the fearless baby who happily splashed around the Umpqua River on his dad’s shoulders is gone, replaced by a suspicious preschooler who wants nothing to do with that shit, and by the way are there sharks in rivers?
We finally got the damn lessons booked (which, as a sidenote, has officially tipped our family Busy-O-Meter into the red zone; not that the kids are over-scheduled but I sure as hell feel like I am) and his first swim day was Monday.
Riley is a bit of a tentative kid, maybe a little extra sensitive about certain things. He’s not a fan of loud noises or startling images or pent-up anticipation (remind me to tell you about the time a well-meaning doctor blew a latex glove into a balloon for him during a checkup! Actually that’s pretty much the whole story, except for the part where he shouted NOOOOOOOOOOO and she was all HOLY FUCK KID I WILL PUT THE HANDBALLOON AWAY NOW), and I assumed this first lesson would be . . . difficult.
And it was, a little. He wailed when he first got in the water, he cried when the instructor held him and moved away from the safety of the pool edge. He cried off and on for the entire half hour.
But get this. Not once did he call to JB or I. He didn’t try and scramble out of the pool and away from the water. He just endured, clearly frightened but sticking it out.
The teacher did all kinds of clever things with Riley and the two other little boys in the class: she had them throw floating toys into the deeper section of the pool, then she’d carry them to go pick them up. She sprinkled water on their heads with a little watering can. She put all three of them on a floating piece of foam and swirled them around.
By the time he was done, he was shivering and still sniffly but smiling. We told him over and over how proud we were of him, and he said “I cried a lot but I did good,” and we said yes, you sure did.
Later, I talked to him about bravery and what it means when you do something even though you’re scared, and his eyes were like big dark pools as he listened to me.
Yesterday was his second class and he didn’t cry once. He squealed with joy when he got swirled through into the deeper end, he floated by himself on a big foam noodle, he squinted but didn’t complain as water was poured on his head.
At the end of the lesson, the instructor coaxed him to jump from the edge of the pool into the water where she caught him, but not before letting him completely submerge. The first time he was shaky and stretched a beseeching hand to her and I could barely watch, and then he did it—jumped, a tangle of skinny boy-elbows and bruised knees—and I sat there on the bleachers and cried like a giant wuss while he climbed back out and did it again.
I took him by the grocery store afterwards and as we were walking the aisles I told him again how incredibly proud I was.
“I’m proud of me too,” he said, then something caught his eye. “Hey Mom? Can I get these Transformers bandaids?”
You know I bought the damn things, right? And a box of mini chocolate donuts to share with his brother, even though it was almost bedtime.
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