Swimming

Wow. There’s no way Charlie would swim like he did today with me. I can’t believe it, there was pretty much nothing he wouldn’t do in the water with his teacher, Dino. Actually Eileen mentioned there was one thing he wouldn’t do and that was to go and pick up rings from the bottom of the pool but really it was incredible to se him do what he did.

He started with the front crawl and then back crawl and even being let go to swim to the wall. No great form, but wow, he’s starting to do it. Most important of all there is that the fear factor isn’t there.

Heck, with me he wouldn’t even go on his back. I’m not sure what it is, I know he trusts me, but no way could I get him to do 1/4 of what he’s doing. Pretty wild. It might be part doing what the teacher says to do, and a lot about peer pressure as all the other kids are doing stuff and its not like he’s doing something no one else is doing.

Wow, I certainly felt like a failure though since I really did try to encourage Charlie to try different things in the pool on our recent trip to Quebec. It’s really amazing and he’s doing a great job. I think its cool.

Library Card

We went for a walk around the neighborhood this afternoon. As always is the case we end up getting new ideas when we’re out there and this time we thought, hey, Aidan love’s the train so lets jump on the train and go for a ride. Eileen mentioned that this wasn’t really walking and exercise so I improvised and said we’ll get off the train in town and walk around there. Then we thought, heck the library is there, its open and its been a while since we visited the French book section.

As usual it was a great time as they had big paper to color on, lots of big colorful books to flip through and the kids section is just very well setup for the kids (I guess that’s by definition). Anyways, the neat part was that we got a library card for Charlie. Seems innocent enough but the moment where Charlie had to sign the form was just a big deal for me. Wow, I thought, really? can’t I just sign it and we’re done here? Nope, he had to come over and fill in a form. That was a first for me.

The line to write your name on is plenty big for me, but for a 5 year old no way. He managed to fit Charles on 75% of the line and though he thought he was finished I let him know that he had to do the b o y l e too. He promptly put down the b o y e and I had to point out the missing l. No problem we squashed it in all together and it looked awesome. I high 5’ved him (we say Clac cinq in French but I don’t remember what we said as kids for that) and then he received his own library card. Fun. And, wow, someone is getting bigger.