I think I mentioned my five year old son who can’t swim. He was born while the older two were swimming competitively, but they quit before he was old enough to take lessons.

And a few years have passed since he’s been old enough, and he’s scared of the water, and he thinks he should know how to swim, so it’s not a good combination.

We asked our daughter to find out if he could take one of her classes. Her boss thought that would work just fine, and told her to bring him today. So our son gets swim lessons, and our daughter gets paid for it. Nice.

Today was water safety day, so our son got to wear a life jacket and sit in a canoe, which our daughter and fellow instructor pushed back and forth between themselves. He thought that was fun. But the part he was proud of was when he jumped in the deep end (!) by himself. (still wearing a life jacket, by the way). This little boy does NOT like to get his face wet, nor does he usually have the courage to jump in the water. But he did it. He went under and came back up, and I think that boosted his confidence.

Then my daughter told him to swim back down to the shallow end. He flailed around but didn’t really move. He did manage to get himself to the wall, I noticed, where he tried to pull himself towards the shallow end. My daughter finished launching her young swimmers and came back to her little brother and helped him and another non-swimmer make it back to the shallow end.

The lesson was short and sweet. But I noticed something at bath time tonight. My son actually listened to me when I washed his hair. Instead of his usual irrational thrashing, he leaned back in the water and allowed me to rinse his hair.

In my house, that’s the first benefit of swim lessons.