Three weeks ago Brayden asked to take off his puddle jumper and practice swimming in the shallow end.  Mind you, our pool is really strange, so the shallow end is like 5% of the pool.  It’s tiny.  None the less, we let him do it, only if one of us was IN the pool with him.  He could swim about three inches.  Since then we’ve done lots of practice swimming, as he calls it. He’s been improving by leaps and bounds since then.  Three inches has turned into many, many feet.  He’s been doing amazing.

Tonight we were having “family time” as Brayden calls it.  I asked James how you go about letting a child jump off the diving board for the first time without their floaties.  He said, I don’t know. . . you just DO it.

So we just DID it.  James got in the pool and waited for Brayden to jump in so that he could help him.  And Brayden jumped in without hesitation and swam to James who was waiting.  By the third time off the board, Brayden jumped in and swam ALL the way to the shallow end to the stairs.  Completely by himself.  My jaw almost dropped.  He’s growing up, that boy.

On a side note, there is not one thing in the world that makes me more nervous than little kids and water.  I am not really stressed out about much of anything. . . I’m not normally anxious.  But for some reason, pools and bodies of water with kids makes me crazy.  I often wake up in the middle of the night in a panic and bolt out of bed because I am dreaming that someone is drowning.  So when Brayden does his practice swimming, I literally am on edge the entire time, thinking that he’s too close to where it slopes off.  So rest assured, James was literally inches from Brayden the entire time he was jumping and swimming.