Nightmare Lap Swimming With a Child

I decided to take my youngest with me to lap swimming the other day. It was a fiasco. It may be some time before I do that again.

I can't really blame it on my daughter. Although she is extremely active and strong-willed, she is just a kid. She's just a kid who insists on having her hands into everything.

When we went down to the locker room to undress, she told me that she didn't bring a lock. The locker room has very small lockers. I had to rearrange our things several times to get them into the locker. She kept trying to put the lock on before I could get the locker locked. Finally I managed to squish everything in the small space and she insisted on putting the lock on. When she came away, the keys weren't in the lock. "Where are the keys?" I asked. Luckily they were in her hand. I insisted that she give them to me.

We walked to the showers. As we were stepping in, I asked her where she put her cap and googles. Of course, its in the locked locker. She wanted to unlock the lock, but I had the keys. I insisted that I needed to unlock the lock. She grabbed her googles and cap. I did the rearranging part a few times again. She kept trying to grab the lock out of my hand because she wanted to lock the locker. I persisted and locked everything up.

We showered and went out to do the lap swim. Instead of 3 lanes open for lap swiming, they only had 2 lanes. We hopped in the pool and started our first lap. Now she is on a swim team and can swim pretty well. This was however a different pool than the one she normally uses. She swam to about halfway across and flipped out. She realized that we had reached the deep end. She swam to the edge and held on.

After much coaxing and prying of her fingers off the edge of the pool, I finally convinced her that it was no deeper than her normal practice pool. When we finished our first lap, she had the nerve to ask me if she could swim down and touch the bottom. NO! How can a child who was one minute frightened of the bottom want to touch the bottom want to go explore it! Sheez!

Of course she insisted that I stay with her the whole time during lap swim. After much arguing, she agreed that I didn't need to do the same stroke as her every time. I did, however, have to stay behind her. I relented.

Everything was going along smoothly until we ended up with 3 other swimmers in our lane. I tried to explain to her how to do a round-robin in the pool. She just didn't get it. She drifted over to the other side as she was swimming and insisted on passing people in the return lane as another swimmer was heading her direction.

She insisted on trying out every single piece of equipment the pool provided. She wanted me to get out of the pool and help her find a new piece. I put my flipper down and told her "No!". She finally settled down and did a few laps.

At one point she was going so slow, I insisted she put on her fins. She whined the whole time about them not fitting right, how they were going to give her blisters and so on. When she finished her second lap, she stopped about 3/4s of the way across and screamed bloody murder. She had a cramp in her leg.

I massaged her leg a bit. I set her up on the edge of the pool. I told her I was going to do two laps by myself. I hastily did my two laps. We got out and headed into the locker room. We again fought over the lock. She took her bag out of the locker and I locked the lock. As I was pulling my hand away, I realized that the keys were missing. Yep! You guessed it! I locked my keys inside the locker.

We had to convince someone to go upstairs and get someone to unlock my locker. As we were heading out the door, I tossed my broken lock in the trash. I put my arm around my daughter and steered her out to the car. Well at least I didn't start screaming or blaming my daughter for my mistake.

I just have such a difficult time trying to hold it all together with so many distractions. My husband says it's a mommy protection thing. I don't know. I'm definitely not super mom. I've never been very successful at juggling kids and other things at the same time.

It will be a long time before I go lap swimming with my daughter again. I think we'll just take turns watching each other swim in our different pools.