Thanks to peer pressure (two older friends who came to swim this weekend with M), a little Jedi mind-trickery (thanks to those boys' mommy), and old-fashioned bribery (Reese's peanut butter cups), the child finally decided that she could, in fact, swim with her face in the water again.
A little back story - allllll last summer, she was jumping off the diving board, swimming with her face in the water more than out, letting us throw her in the pool, doing bobs, and generally had no fear about being in the pool.
Then she jumped into a freezing cold pool early this season, had a bit of a shock, maybe maybe had some water go up her nose, and all of a sudden we'd regressed to head-out-of-the-water swimming.
To make matters worse, we tried swimming lessons a couple weeks ago, and being "forced" to do things in the pool that she didn't want to made her regress even further. We pulled her from lessons after the second day because she was suddenly afraid to be in the water without both her floaty AND a pool noodle for flotation.
Fast forward to this weekend. We had friends over to swim and have dinner. They have two boys, both older than Michaela, but not so old as to be really big kids. Their boys are on the CG swim team here, and are like little fish. On top of that, Jess (their mom) helps to teach the youngest group of swimmers, so she had a cool little trick of using a dive ring to "talk to the fish" that Michaela thought was pretty fantastic. Between those two things, and leaving my truly stubborn child to her own devices, all of a sudden she was proudly sticking her whole face in the water through the dive ring so she could "talk to the fish."
Two days later, and two more afternoons in the pool, and she ONLY swam with her face in the water this afternoon!!! We're not back to jumping into the pool, but at least now we can pick back up with swimming lessons since she's gone to the next step!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!
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