Survival Swimming. Are you a fan?

Picture taken before 1st dunk

I think I've mentioned this already, but I know I haven't gone into it with this much detail, so here it is again. Ben started Survival Swimming 2 weeks ago. Some people say it's torture, but some people swear by it.

I personally know a woman whose 18 month son fell into a pool and was able to turn onto his back and float until his parents fished him out. He took SS and the woman swears it saved her son's life. When I used to work at Babies R Us, I helped a woman whose son suffered brain damage after falling into a pool and almost drowning. He was in an electric wheelchair with a tube and his mother said he would probably be like that for the rest of his life.

It was hard to help them. Not because of the kid, but because of the mother. She was beating herself up and it was brutal. She opened up with, "Hi, I need a car seat for my son, he drowned because of me. It was totally my fault and now I need a car seat for him." Back then I thought "wow, the guilt she must feel if she is beating herself up like that in front of me" but now that I have a kid, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of guilt and pain she was going through. I never want to go through that.

If Ben has to cry a little bit now to avoid something like that happening, then sorry buddy, you're gonna cry. I'm a big talker. I haven't been there for one of his classes. Allison, Ellen and Hy have all taken him and from what I hear it's really tough to watch. I've seen about 2 minutes of video from class, but that's completely different.

When I'm watching the video, Ben is home, safe and sound. I just gave him a kiss and I'm watching him play with his toys. I know that he survived whatever I'm about to see on that video, so it's no biggie. That might change on Friday though, when I actually sit in on a class. Wish me luck. If there are no posts after Friday it's because I decided to pop the teacher and dunk her underwater to see how she likes it!

Do you have any survival swimming stories? Let's hear them. Happier posts and cute pix to follow in the next few days. Sorry my first post back is a downer, but I had to get that out of my system. I tried to type other stuff, but kept coming back to this.

PS: This has nothing to do with Survival Swimming, but when I ran spell check, it said "no misspellings found!" YEAH! What up Merriam-Webster Dictionary? You want some of this, Oxford American Dictionary? WHAT!