Ben recently completed an intense two-week swimming lessons program. His lessons were Monday through Thursday for two weeks. Spoiler alert: he loved it and made tremendous progress from start to finish.

Teacher Susie has her own pool at her house and has made quite the business of teaching swimming lessons to area kids. I believe her business is completely word of mouth and all of her classes fill up completely. She has quite a reputation and everyone seems to know about her program and the results she gets.

Her approach is a bit different than anything I’ve seen before, and it works. She has it all down pat. Her class sizes are unusually large and mixed age and ability but she’s got it figured out. Her pool shape has this little one-foot deep section and a two-and-a-half-foot shallow end so it’s great for tots.

Teacher Susie is no-nonsense and has very, very high expectations of the kids, which I appreciate. Her approach worked very well for Ben and I appreciated her firm boundaries and how much she pushed him. He responded really well to her style and progressed significantly.

By the second week Ben was jumping off the diving board and swimming {struggling!} to the side of the pool. Honestly, I don’t need Ben to be a beautiful swimmer – I need to feel confident that if when he jumps in without anyone there to catch him {oh wait – that happened on day one of swimming lessons} that he can safely make it to the side. And he can! He is capable.

At this point Ben needs to practice, practice, practice more to build up strength in the water but goodness gracious he’s getting there! He’s so comfortable and confident in the water and he is really starting to learn how to swim.

It was SO fun to watch him at swimming lessons these last two weeks. He loved it so much and it was undeniably the highlight of every single day for both of us. We’re signed up for another session later on this summer, so hopefully we’ll get a lot of practice in in the meantime.