Don't you have a river in your backyard?
I think waterboarding would be more productive.
"Sorry, if you don't answer when I call, I go on to the next person"
That was the plot in Night Court of how Harry got to be a judge- all the other qualified lawyers were out at a party or something, so eventually they got to the bottom of the list where he was.
Could you say more about the swimming lessons? That sounds so bizarre. When I was a kid, we signed up for the summer's lessons all at once, or for several months' if it were winter and we were at the YMCA. Do they do different kinds of swimming each week?
The swimming is super bizarre! I don't understand why every week has to be super frantic last minute. It's private lessons, not group lessons, which does make the scheduling sort of complicated. We took private lessons through Local State U in the past. The way they did it is that you just bought N lessons with no associated time frame. The scheduler just assigned you an instructor, and you and the instructor worked out the details. That seemed fine. This year we're doing lessons through the city public pool.
Private lessons at the city pool? That makes the weirdness less surprising, albeit still not justifiable or non-maddening.
Yes, I can't understand why it isn't simpler for everyone involved just to say, at the start of the summer, "you will have a swimming lesson every [for example] Monday at 3.30 for the next ten weeks. That will be $250 please. Next!"
I can't understand why it isn't simpler for Heebie to just throw kids into her private river until they learn to swim. One the oldest one has learned she can even delegate. And kids are psychopaths so they'd love it.
I have not been able to find any place in town to take private lessons besides the university, the city pool, and one crazy instructor who does this madness which is a good thing for what it is, but she was a royal jerk when I broached the idea of regular swim lessons for older kids. I can't get past the "10 minutes a day, every day for two weeks, for five times the cost of regular lessons."
Not sure if a flamethrower would help here but you're past the point where it could hurt.
Why are private swimming lessons even important? It seems like the sort of thing that for all functional non-regular-exercise or competition swimming could be taught relatively quickly when you take the kids to the pool yourself. I learned how to swim at (mostly public) school as well. It was just part of the general phys ed. curriculum. But even if that's not the case, why are private swimming lessons even important? It seems like the sort of thing that for all functional non-regular-exercise or competition swimming could be taught relatively quickly when you take the kids to the pool yourself. They might not learn proper technique for the crawl, or which styles are best for different situations, but that's not that important and if they care about it later they could figure that out on their own.
I dunno, we're bad swimmers, I want them safe in water. I dunno, we're bad swimmers, I want them safe in water. I dunno, we're bad swimmers, I want them safe in water.
They're both stupid and infuriating.
I tried to schedule dentist appointments with my dentist here in NY while I'm on leave. Did it almost two months in advance but I still got shitty appointments which are going to interfere with other stuff I need to do because the (new) receptionist must have needed special training in how to reply to fucking emails.
Never heard of private lessons at a city pool. Are you opposed to group swim lessons?
Swimming in public schools still strikes me as bizarre. We had PE at school, and I knew kids/families who had their own pools, but schools didn't have pools.
I can't understand why it isn't simpler for Heebie to just throw kids into her private river until they learn to swim.
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN
I had group swimming lessons for years, because we grew up on the ocean, and it was great - a) you become really comfortable in the water b) if you live next to a body of water and plan to use it, you want to make sure you have strong enough swimmers to be safe c) it's excellent exercise. My parents definitely did not have the know-how to teach us everything we learned, and it was done in a safe environment, with life guards, without the chaos of trying to do it amidst cannonballs and general shenanigans. (Which also happened, post lessons, in general free swims.) I'm not sure about the appeal of private vs group but perhaps that's just more of what's available in HG's area.
17: What about swimming as a sport? We had private swim teams in our area, but in our high school swimming and water polo were really big. We also had to pass a swim test to graduate.
Otoh, My kids are at a weeklong sleep away camp a major part of the daily recreation of which is swimming in the pool, except you have to pass a swim test to be able to do that (or you get relegated to the shallow end only and I think also forced to wear a floatation vest), and I'm very worried that my youngest may have failed his swim test and will therefore be upset all week. He's actually very safe in the water and great at keeping himself afloat and comfortable jumping off high dives, etc., but he can't make any forward progress swimming in normal stomach-down position. He just flails. To make forward progress, he has to roll onto his back (which he does on his own without fail). But I'm worried they will try to force him to do a standard stroke across the pool, and he will fail.
Never heard of private lessons at a city pool. Are you opposed to group swim lessons?
It just seemed like they weren't learning to swim in group lessons whatsoever. They'd do Windmill Arm Circles and scoop the water and kick around using a kickboard and that seemed to be about it.
Last summer we did not swim much at all, because Pokey broke his arm and the town kept flooding.
This summer, at age 7, Hawaii actually seems to have an intuitive notion of how to swim underwater and propel herself safely around, basically. Pokey basically does not. He looks like the poster child for the "drowning doesn't look like drowning" meme, and afterwards he's so full of pool water that he can't eat dinner.
Maybe my kids are denser than you all and your kids.
Last summer we did not swim much at all, because Pokey broke his arm and the town kept flooding.
The latter at least would imply more swimming rather than less.
"Sorry I was late, but someone tampered with my brakes."
HOMER: "Then you should have got here early!"
20: These kids are way too young for marijuana. I'm surprised you'd even suggest it.
Last summer we did not swim much at all, because the town kept flooding.
You people make less sense all the time.
23: Do you know what really peeves me? I have always been essentially a human flotation device. Do you remember playing 'tea party' or doing other underwater things at the pool? I CANNOT DO IT. I just bob. All those swimming lessons were probably wasted on me.
22.1: I guess I wonder if finding group classes that were actually effective might me easier than dealing with all this scheduling nonsense. (Which sounds maddening.) YMCA usually has good swim classes, and you don't need to be a member.
27: have you tried exhaling? If that doesn't work, use ankle weights.
I went swimming one time with a friend like you. She found treading water a relaxing way to stop for a rest. I find treading water to be fairly intense exercise. We were not very compatible swimmers.
I must have the same body type as you, heebie. If I stop actively treading water for an instant I sink.
In secondary school I was volunteered to be the rescuee in the final test for a life-saving class. Having to stay treading water in the deep end for five or ten minutes at a time while each person got ready, the examiner checked her clip-board, and so on, I got so exhausted I had to shout for them to hurry up before I actually did drown.
If you want to float better, just drink a cup of helium before you go in.
Your frozen viscera will be less dense than water and act as a flotation device.
31: it is possible you are trying to stay too high in the water. Treading water should not have your head and shoulders above the surface - that just makes it more work. The extreme of this is something they called "drownproofing" when I learned it, a sort of passive float face down aimed at conserving energy and body heat, lifting the head to breathe only.
34: Whichever way I try to float, whether on my front or back, my legs drop down and I end up sinking to the bottom. The only way I can keep my head above the surface is by constantly moving my arms and legs. It's a lot easier just to swim.
29: Of course I did - I used to empty my lungs completely and kick like mad and then I'd hit the bottom .... and be out of air. I have decided I have hollow bones or something. (I do have a really big rib cage & excellent lung capacity, which might actually be part of the issue, in seriousness.)
Ume and I are the exact opposite!
27: I'm the opposite: I've never, ever been able to float on my back. My legs drop down, and I'm left straining to keep my mouth and nose above water. I'm not even that lean anymore. I also find treading water to be reasonably intense: if, for some reason, I find myself in the deep end for awhile, I realize that my legs are getting tired as hell.
Kai just came back from swim lessons at the public school, which are free and taught when the pools are otherwise empty. He's annoyed at the emphasis on freestyle, as he prefers (and is effective at) breaststroke. Kid's too stubborn to recognize that learning the stroke he doesn't already know is the function of lessons.
Hey Ume and H-G, let's form a team for retrieving things from the bottoms of pools! We can really put it to Paren's team.
I really prefer the breaststroke to crawl, even without the potential for innuendo. It's not that I'm faster, it's just so much easier to breath and see where you are going.
36: well, then add more weight to the ankle weights. At some point it will be enough to keep you from floating back up.
That does sound crazy for scheduling Heebie. It seems like there are much better alternatives. I wonder if they tried scheduling weeks out, but people couldn't actually plan ahead that far so they kept making annoying to them last minute adjustments?
Yeah - while I've been freaked out a couple of times by getting caught in a very large wave and losing track of which way was up, I've never particularly had a hard time keeping my head above the surface in a float or the like.
Wouldn't a weight belt make more sense than ankle weights? You could take it off much easier if, for some reason, you wanted to go back up.
38: Mean. I actually didn't use to be as terrible at retrieving things as other underwater games because I could push down, I just had to grab whatever it was on the first try.....
I keep thinking about the line Heebie should use before engaging the Flamethrower. "My appointment ... Has just been made." "Free swim .. Just got costly.
43: sure, if you have acces to a dive belt or other weight belt, that would work great. But not everyone has one of those laying around the house. Whereas everyone already has ankle weights, from Jazzercise.
I was going to say that I don't have ankle weights, but then it occurs to me that I very possibly do have them in a community property sense. I don't know that there are some in the house, but I wouldn't take an even money bet against.
46: Oh yes. Totally have those lying around.
(In actuality my mom is at Jazzercise this very minute and probably does have some. She's a bit far away though.)
I guess we are all so inured to medical appointment scheduling being a soul-sucking horror that we are concentrating on the swim lessons?
All weights are ankle weights if you have duct tape.
49: I'm pretty sure Tigre was suggesting the flamethrower for the doctor's office as well.
I had group swimming lessons for years, because we grew up on the ocean, and it was great - a) you become really comfortable in the water b) if you live next to a body of water and plan to use it, you want to make sure you have strong enough swimmers to be safe c) it's excellent exercise.
So far our finding has been: small group swimming lessons are useful. Large group swimming lessons result in learning nothing nothing nothing nothing. They probably work better for kids who have a greater baseline level of comfort in the water than ours has.
Large group swimming lessons result in learning nothing nothing nothing nothing. They probably work better for kids who have a greater baseline level of comfort in the water than ours has.
Or if they're very highly regimented. My kids learned to swim in Osaka, with eight simultaneous classes of up to 20 kids all doing lengths at the same time, following each other up and down their lane. Both boys have ended up fast swimmers and competent at all four strokes, but they've never been taught how to float.
I'm actually 100% combined that the best way for kids to initially learn to swim is just spending lots of time playing in a pool that has a shallow end they can stand in and a deeper end where they would have to swim. They'll play in the shallow water until they get comfortable and venture to the deep more and more as they get ready. Obviously a drawback is that this could require heighted adult supervision for a longer time than some other methods.
There are more than four strokes. I took lessons for years as a kid and we had to learn so many pointless strokes. Still, none of them were as pointless as Butterfly. Which, I guess, is probably one of the four you mention.
I and most Narnians I know learned swimming in group lessons in public pools, and they were very effective. I believe they were designed by the Narnian govt so that's unsurprising. They are highly regimented like the one described in Osaka and they did teach us treading water, plunging, and how to make a float out of your trousers. (The swim tests always had a segment where you had to swim a few laps in pajamas and then remove them and make floats out of them.) The most advanced lessons would teach you rescue skills.
55: Why is butterfly pointless?
Because I was always horrible at it.
55: Crawl, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly. By the end of the basic course the kids were swimming 200 m individual medley, and had to beat a set time for their age to be promoted to the next level up. Different private swimming schools had different orders of teaching them, but they were all basically intended to produce competitive swimmers.
I should really be using a blog alias for my country of previous residence, I suppose. The Pokemon Empire? The Shogunate? Land of the Aging Sun?
My swim coach once accidentally (she said) signed me up for a 200M Butterfly. Then, instead of scratching, she persuaded me to try it anyway. Then I got disqualified on the first link. I think mostly because they realized they didn't have ten minutes to wait for me to finish the whole 200 meters.
59: The Pokémon National Championships was held here In the heart of the heart of it all this past weekend!
Land of the Aging Sun is excellent but I think a little straightforward. Land of the Setting Sun, to muddy the water a little?
Speaking of butterfly, the fish kick (sideways butterfly) is now being touted as faster than conventional butterfly. No breathing, so must be combined with other strokes.
http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/is-this-new-swim-stroke-the-fastest-yet
63: Doesn't "Freestyle" mean you can do whatever?
63: that's interesting but I wonder if the benefits would continue to be seen if everyone were doing it.
Oh our group classes had ... five kids? Or so. Maybe an even number. Not large and lots of individual attention at every point.
57: It's difficult and utterly impractical for getting from point A to point B in the water relative to the non-crazy strokes like crawl of breaststroke. Unless you are Michael Phelps your better off learning macrame.
Oh, don't waste my time with flattery.
I meant practically speaking you have to eventually come up and breathe, and thus use some other stroke for a while. But also, I believe there are rules about how long you can spend underwater in competition. Even in freestyle.
There's some confusion in this thread, I think, between group classes to get better at swimming vs group classes to keep from sinking to the floor. When the kids were 3-5 and sinking to the floor, they were pretty worthless. I mean, they were nice for getting used to the water, but no different than if I got in the water with them. (The advantage being that their daycare offers group lessons and walks them over to the university pool.) Group lessons for Hawaii next year, where she has a lane and has to traverse it, is an entirely different thing (that maybe we'll do. There seems to be a kid's swim league in town.)
I was on a town swim league and look how I turned out.
There are more worthless swim lessons out there than you'd expect. Sally and Newt got literally nothing out of their first two sets of lessons (just as Heebie describes). The third place we went, I'm not dead sure what they were doing differently, but it involved successfully teaching the kids to swim properly.
Butterfly has no purpose but in racing, whereas other strokes also have survival purposes-
Front crawl- fastest way from A to B
Breast- less tiring while still seeing where you're going
Back crawl- easiest to stop and rest
Elementary back- less tiring than back but slower
Sidestroke- easiest to maintain longest.
Most classes don't even teach EBS and side because they're not racing strokes but they're really useful for not drowning if you're far out in the water.
I guess sidestroke was the one I always wondered about. They made sure we knew that and I could never figure why.
Sidestroke is mostly gliding- one simultaneous push of arms and legs then glide. Similar to EBS although I've found the risk of getting water up your nose is higher with that. Also can look where you're going with sidestroke- I did a pseudo-triathalon once and manged to avoid crashing into a rock in the lake because I was on side instead of back.
Most classes don't even teach EBS and side because they're not racing strokes but they're really useful for not drowning if you're far out in the water.
This is concerning.
I always hated backstroke because of the crashing into stuff and the water up the nose stuff.
Hawaii absolutely cannot come up for air when she's swimming underwater - she stops and dogpaddles and loses her momentum and runs out of gas, basically. I was trying to teach her to do a single EBS stroke to get her head out of the water and catch a breath. She pulled out her signature tweeny-huff-eyeroll and said, "Don't say it - chicken wing, superman, soldier, I know", which cracked me up because that so was not on the tip of my tongue whatsoever.
I believe the canonical form is "Chicken Airplane Soldier"- arms go out to the side, not over your head. UR DOIN IT RONG HP!
My kids have never had any lessons but the free group ones at the public pools. No drownings yet!
Oh maybe it was chicken-airplane-soldier. I'd never heard it before!
We learned it in this book not in any swimming class.
There are youtube videos demonstrating if you want to learn to swim like a 7 year old, Mobes.
85: I've been enjoying Selah's scorn about how Lee can't swim, even though I didn't get them into lessons this summer because I have too much going on already, but she's making progress and indeed you can go under water a lot, dear, and Mama can't even swim at all. Assuming I get my act together, we'll join the Y again and do indoor lessons this fall as well as skating(/hockey?) and the kids' CrossFit they'll be able to walk to from the new place. I may finally make the bar for middle-class acceptability by kind of moving us out of the middle class.
I loved swimming as a kid but I stopped doing it routinely in high school. Inthe meanwhile something changed in the configuration of my head and now I get horrible sinus pain if I go more than a few feet deep. Total bummer.
||
The release date for Soviet Monsters: Ekranoplans, previously 7/1, has been pushed back 2 weeks, but there are new posts and screenshots (models, locations/missions). Looks like it's not an abandoned project, as I feared.
|>
89 OMG, that might be my first Steam game ever.
The video linked in 11 blew my mind-- I'd always been told that kids under about 3 float vertically and there was no point in trying to teach back-floating. Guess that was wrong. I'm like Paren, could probably fall asleep floating. My son was a good swimmer but now at almost 10 has anxiety in the lakes and the quarries about what might be lurking on the bottom. And he is so constantly mis-gendered (like, every day) that he won't take his shirt off in case people were to think he's a girl without a shirt, and that makes floating harder. I've dialled my expectation way back. This is going to be an interesting summer.
Before this thread I never really believed that some people could float without effort or found it easy to tread water. All those water polo guys are not the supermen I thought!
I think I learned to swim at around 3 or 4. I did "age group" swimming as part of a club from 6 to 13. I don't think I've gone swimming since before 2000. I haven't missed it at all.
for me, butterfly is by far the fastest stroke, though it isn't as efficient for longer swims.
I can do the side stroke like a champ. I can do the backstroke, breaststroke, or butterfly stroke until I get worried about hitting something, which invariably happens less than halfway until I actually would. The problem with the breaststroke or butterfly stroke is opening my eyes in the water. Maybe I should try them with goggles someday, just to see what it's like?
This is another bit of parenting problems that I won't have to worry about for years yet. We've taken Atossa to baby swim classes and baby yoga classes and they mostly consisted or passing her back and forth between us, just trying to habituate her to the setting, and preventing meltdowns. As she's become more active and mobile, I've worried about the outdoorsy or physical-fitness aspects of growing up in a city. I assume there will be years between when she's capable of riding a bike and when she can be trusted to do it on a city street, swimming in a pool is nothing like swimming in the river, I have fond memories of exploring the woods right outside my house, sometimes there's some pretty gross trash in the local park. I was looking forward to getting her to her grandparents' houses in rural areas where she can actually "be a kid" or whatever.
But we went to my parent's house last week and she just kept trying to eat grass and twigs, because she's still that age. So, you know, borrowing trouble.
I am right at the edge of buoyancy. If I expel air from my lungs I will sink.
that might be my first Steam game ever. I'd never heard it before!