Our Littlest Mermaid

First swim class: Oh, this is gonna be great!

Holy cow is that water cold! (It all goes down hill from there. Final picture of Day 1. See below for details.)

Second Class: Well, it might not be pretty but at least I'm dong something besides crying this time.

I'm holding this duck hostage. You cannot make me do that.

Seriously, Daddy can you make her stop? And for God's sake don't photograph it!

Ever since Olivia took her first dip in her Nana and Grampy's pool when she was a few months old, she has been a total water baby. Whether it's drinking it, bath time, beach time or running around in a "spraygound" our girl LOVES water. So we decided it would be a great time to start swim lessons.

A couple of weeks ago she started half-hour Saturday sessions at our local YMCA. When Mommy took her into the pool she was all smiles. For the first five minutes. Imagine our surprise when she started crying and kept crying until the end of the session. About the only lesson Livi wanted to participate in was learning how to climb out of the pool by herself. She wanted to bolt to Daddy who had stopped snapping pictures by this point for obvious reasons. I couldn't understand it. Why did our Water Baby suddenly despise any aspect of it? Was it the pressure of being in a class? Did she not like her two classmates? Was the pool too cold? Too big? Or was it something else?

It turned out it was indeed something else. Later, we discovered Olivia had a low-grade fever that lasted the rest of the day. Poor baby. Fortunately, she had recovered by the next morning.

At her second lesson this past Saturday, she sort of did things the opposite of the first day. She was very hesitant to get into the pool and once in wasn't into it for about five minutes . Then she seemed fine.

We practiced throwing a toy and with the help of Mommy swimming to it. We sang the Hokey Pokey and turned outselves around in the pool and we did another little number: "Motor Boat, Motor Boat," swirling around the babies so they would practice kicking. Again, she seemed a master at pulling herself out of the pool from the wall.

This time after the official class was done, we went over to the kiddie pool which is about chest- deep on her. We tooled around for quite awhile and she was all smiles and giggles. She kicked more than she had in class and really loved trying to float on her back and trying to blow bubbles with her face a bit in the water. Then it happened. She was giggling away just walking around the edge of the pool and Livi did what she often does on dry land. She fell.

In a second she was completely under water, head and all. It was like everything went in slow motion for a moment. I looked down under the water and saw my sweet baby in her watermelon-print bathing suit floating in the water, but she didn't look like dead weight. She was kicking and moving her arms a bit. She looked like she was swimming. As David, who was sitting nearby outside the pool, was about to jump in, I swooped down and grabbed her. It was all in a matter of a couple of seconds. I fully expected cries - or a least coughing and lots of it. But neither happened. She sat in my arms silent, her hazel eyes scanning the area like she was trying to make sense of what happened. In an instant, though, she was happily playing in the pool again.

A couple of hours later, she and I took another dip in Nana and Grampy's pool. We hope next week's lesson goes even better. We can't wait to see our Littlest Mermaid parting the water.