Swimming lessons for kids: A necessary evil

I love swimming. I’m not amazing at it, but I enjoy it and I rarely feel as good as when I’ve spent an hour or so in the pool.

Unless I take my kids, of course.

We’ve very recently started swimming lessons for my oldest.

I feel pretty bad that we’ve left it this long. Swimming is a pretty vital life skill, and one day I’d like to go on a holiday and not have to worry that they’ll drown, but there has never seemed a good time to start.

These aren’t actually her first ever swimming lessons.

When she was a tiny baby entirely incapable of learning or doing anything useful, I paid an eyewatering sum of money to take her to ‘Puddleducks’ baby swimming lessons at a private pool.

The entire morning before these lessons would see me willing her to have a nap so she wouldn’t scream all the way through. Once there, it would be time to get my inevitably overtired daughter and I changed; trying to get a writhing baby into a swim nappy, then an over nappy and then a wetsuit is some fun I promise you.

I would then spend the mercifully short half-hour lesson itself mostly praying she didn’t shit or vomit in the pool, before coming out and getting us both changed again. The swim school itself was lovely, of course – warm pool, friendly staff – but it was hard to appreciate any of that while trying to survive the chaos.

I do actually have some fond memories of the whole thing with my little splishy splashy baby.

Looking back at it rationally, however, it was pretty much a con.

I’d file baby swimming lessons under one of those things that is entirely unnecessary but you do it anyway because you feel you should; and who doesn’t want to spunk £140 of their maternity pay on a stressful experience their child won’t even remember?

When my second was born, I obviously already had a toddler.

Swimming with two children under two, three or even four is definitely a two-adult job.

It’s also not high on the priority list when you’re sleeping for two hours at a time and wiping vomit off your shoulders constantly.

Such is the life of a poor, neglected second child that he never got the £14-a-lesson weekly dip in the pool. The first time he went swimming was at our local council-run pool with screaming kids, floating plasters and verrucas.

It is to this very same pool that we now traipse for the weekly swimming lesson.

It’s great fun; preschool pick up at 2, school pick up at 3.15 and straight to the pool for a 4pm start. Not stressful at all.

My smallest is still on the waiting list, so I have a choice:

All go in, get changed, and take him into the pool while she has her lesson, or sit at the side watching the lesson.

Pros of going into the pool include the fact that he’s entertained, he enjoys it, there’s no overheating or boob sweat and I don’t have to get myself soaked washing my daughter’s hair in the shower because the button needs to be pressed every 6 seconds and she can’t do it herself.

Cons include the fact that my kids can’t actually swim yet.

In my daughter’s case she sinks even with armbands on (I don’t even know how she manages to do that), and when she finishes her short lesson and comes to join us in the main pool where neither of them can reach the bottom, it’s basically a fairly serious game of trying to keep them both from drowning. Funsies!

Added to this we have the pleasure of the changing room conversation.

My children are at the ‘delightful’ age where they like to point things out, like how big my bottom is, and that I don’t have a willy but a VAGINA, and they like to do it very loudly.

My son informed me that mummies have three holes; one to wee from, one to poo from, and one to have a baby from, which although accurate – well done preschool – is not something I particularly wanted the family in the next cubicle to overhear.

Then, lastly, we have the fact that to get them out of the pool always requires a significant amount of bribery on my part.

This is usually in the form of dinner, with chips, at the attached cafe.

And suddenly our cheap and cheerful council-run lessons aren’t so cheap any longer and we’re probably all less healthy than when we started.

I know that it’ll all be worth it if they actually learn to swim, but at this point I do sometimes wish I’d just chucked them in the pool like they used to swear by in the olden days.