Water

Laurel loves the water.

I took her in a swimming pool for the first time last summer, and she seemed to like it, but it was just one time. We don't have a pool ourselves, so she didn't have any other opportunities. Yes, Isaac took swimming lessons last summer, but since Laurel was only six or seven months old I thought she was too young. (Speaking of Isaac, he was nearly two years old when he went in a swimming pool for the first time, and he hated it. Luckily he has gotten over his antipathy, and this summer he has been truly enthusiastic about the water.)

This summer Laurel turned 18 months old, so I enrolled her in parent-child swimming lessons, which she loved. She also spent a lot of time in the water during our recent vacation in Minnesota. While we were staying at the lakeside resort in northern Minnesota, most days we simply walked back and forth from the lake to the pool to the boathouse. There's something wonderful about staying in your swimming suit all day long.

Laurel liked jumping into the swimming pool. She is learning her numbers (I'll write about language development soon, I promise), and whenever I set her on the edge of the pool she said, "Four, five, six!" and leaped into the water. Except she leaped on "five," so I had to be alert.

Laurel enjoyed the swimming pool, but she really loved playing in the shallows of the lake, perhaps because she didn't have to be constantly held by someone. She walked back and forth in the water, sticking fairly close to the shoreline. Other times she squatted in the water and dug in the sandy bottom. She loved picking up small stones and shells, dropping them, and watching them fall back down through the clear water. She didn't venture in too deep, luckily, so whenever she lost her balance and fell, she was only submerged up to her armpits.

On our last day at the lake, she sat on an inflatable raft with Isaac, and then he climbed down and towed her around for a while. They were both having a wonderful time, laughing and pretending to be boats, but I kept reminding him not to go out too deep. Although the lake is shallow enough that Isaac could walk out 50 or so feet from shore, it quickly grows deep enough that it would be completely over Laurel's head if she tumbled off the raft -- which it was when she eventually did fall off.

I had made an effort to stay within a step or two of the raft, so I picked her up immediately. She sputtered a bit, and I gave her a hug; I also asked her kindly if she had remembered her swimming teacher's advice to blow bubbles while she was under the water. But I was not surprised when, after a minute in my arms, she began fussing -- not because she was upset by her underwater adventure, but because she wanted me to put her back on the raft.

Temperament is everything, isn't it? A parent can't really teach a year and a half old kid to not mind falling in the lake. Either the water closing over her head is a big deal to her, or it isn't.