In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of our lunar landing.
In sunny South Florida in April 1969, I was one month into my 29th year and over eight months pregnant with my first child. For a round, shiny dime at a garage sale, I had purchased a slim, soft cover book called Teaching Your Infant to Swim, whose author is, sadly, long forgotten. Naively perhaps, I was determined that even though my home had a swimming pool with three large access doors, no baby of mine was going to become a statistic.
On April 24th I delivered a six-pound, twelve-ounce boy, 21 inches long, all appendages intact, all systems seemingly in excellent working order. He was the most beautiful, the most amazing baby in the world, of course. His progress was normal or above, and since my little book had said that an infant as young as three months could be taught to swim, I looked forward to July 24th with only slight misgiving. (The rest of his family was not so confident, needless to say.)
Nearly three months later, Apollo 11’s lunar module, the Eagle, made its landing on the moon without a hitch, and Neil Armstrong took his famous historic walk. Taking that as a sign, I went into the pool with my baby boy. He was nestled securely in the crook of my left arm. I held red and white colored poker chips above our heads in my right hand as we descended the steps in the shallow end of our pool. When the water slid up from his feet to his waist to his chest he began to move his body dolphin-like. As his legs and his bottom started to go, we locked eyes, he grinned at me, and we took a deep breath together and went under.
With his round blue eyes wide open he stared with wonder at the slowly descending chips floating one by one magically from above our heads. He reached for them and managed to capture one, a white one, as round and bright as the moon. A few small bubbles occasionally slipped from his mouth, but he never once tried to take a breath under water.
We came up and repeated the procedure several times, punctuated constantly with my exclamations of praise and his squeals of joy. Soon, I allowed him to wiggle out of my grasp and propel himself – dolphin-like – toward the prized chips. I repeated our “lessons” over and over as the weeks and months passed, until, before he could walk, he could go on his own steam from me, near the middle of the pool, to the side. At sixteen months he could jump into the pool, swim underwater a few feet out, then turn around and swim to the side. By the time he was twenty seven months he loved to dive to the bottom for pennies and bring them to the surface.
I suspect this method of teaching little ones has not survived the test of time, and I’m not sure it would have been appropriate even then for every infant or toddler. But my baby was a true water baby, (still is, you say?) and we’ll never know what, if any, influence his early swimming experiences had on the man who has taken a small, record-breaking step for mankind in the aquatic world.
Pat Ponders Life 