DON'T PANIC! (Immortal words from The Hitchhiker's Guid to the Galaxy)

My daughter didn't have an unhappy pool experience ... quite the opposite, really.

We were swimming at our local rec center the other day, and the head lifeguard asked if she'd be willing to play a victim for a potential lifeguard who was interviewing for a job. She got to pretend to be a victim of all kinds of water emergencies: broken neck, floating on her belly, down at the bottom of the pool, and one or two others.

After all of her rescues, as the new lifeguard did the swim test portion of his interview, I spent a few minutes talking with the head lifeguard, and she commented that my kids were really good swimmers.

That was a shock, but I realized it was true!

See, back in February, I started taking the kids over to the pool a couple of times a week. They hadn't been in swim lessons for 4 or 5 years, but as a former swim team member myself, I felt I could teach them some basic swim skills. Amazingly, with just a few minutes of instruction out of one to two hours of playing in the pool, they started learning skills like treading water. Both have progressed from fear of deep water to happily jumping into the deep end and trying to reach the bottom. Neither could swim more than 6-8 feet back then - and my son can swim a full lap (2 lenghts of the pool) without stopping!

Three months ago, if my daughter were in the deep end of the pool, I would have been certain she would need a real-life rescue. It amazes me to think of how far she has come - how far they both have come - from children who would never leave water where they could stand up to children who really enjoy swimming and need only basic instruction in specific strokes to be proficient swimmers.