ISR for the Win

Starting in mid-July, I enrolled both Danny and Crew in what's called ISR swim lessons. If you look it up, you'll see that the program can train babies as young as 6 months old to self-rescue if they were to fall into water, essentially get to their back and float. For kids Danny and Crew's ages, it's about a swim-float-swim sequence, so essentially they swim with eyes open and "in",  or underwater vs. their head picked up, and then when they need a breath, they flip to their back and enter "starfish" where they can relax and catch their breath and then flip over to swim again. Instead of traditional swim lessons, it's really about survival, so their ultimate goal is to swim-float-swim to get to the wall, stairs, river bank or whatever. No goggles and just eyes open, because kids don't fall into pools with googles on! At the end, kids have to swim in the pool with clothes and shoes on because, again, accidents don't typically happen when you're nicely dressed for a day at the pool!

Danny mastered everything in 2 weeks and is now swimming the vertical lengths of pools like a little fish! He's really using the skills for more water play at this point, e.g. jumping off the wall, entering starfish for a second and then flipping over and swimming back to the wall to repeat all over again. He's also really into diving to the bottom for rings, etc.

Eyes in!

Textbook starfish

Crew being 2.5 years younger than Danny and quite a bit more spastic (sorry, but it's true!), took a bit longer to "graduate" with 5 weeks of daily lessons. What's crazy is the lessons are only 10 mins long, but it's so intensive that it wears them out. This was Crew after his first lesson. He refused to move off the towel for 20 mins. Wouldn't even pick up his head.

In the end, his technique is still not as "clean" as Danny's and he's not swimming per say, but he's safe. At my mom's pool the other day, he stepped off the steps and went under and got to starfish. From starfish, he flips over and swims to you. I'm going to continue working with him to strengthen his skills, but overall I'm happy with where he's at!

Crew with instructor, Amanda

Land starfishing

Proud of himself

At the end of each week, we incentivized with special treats. Here was the first Friday - tattoos from their instructor, Amanda, and Duck Donuts!