Be A Mermaid

 

Before the summer totally gets away from me, I wanted to tell you about how we taught my granddaughter how to swim. 

Cate is four years old, and for some reason, she's always had a pretty strong fear of the water. Baths and showers are fine, shallow baby pools are fine... but actual swimming pools? Not so fine. Since she has a swimming pool in the backyard of her new house, naturally her parents were eager to teach her to swim. They signed her up for swimming lessons last year and this year, but poor Cate was always frightened and would only get into the water if she could ride on her parents' back. After a while, her parents got pretty frustrated with the whole process of teaching Cate to swim. Nothing seemed to be working...

Until Mimi and Opa came to visit (read here: Grandma and Granddad). We all went down to their pool one afternoon and just sat on the steps of the pool in the water and pretended to be mermaids. First we had to swish our mermaid tails back and forth, and after we'd done that for a while, Cate was willing to hold onto a kick board with Mimi and practice her mermaid tail swishing while floating. Pretty soon she was laughing and kicking up water to splash Opa. She actually got brave enough to jump into the water so Opa could catch her! It just goes to show you that using play and the imagination of a child can really be the key to solving some hard-to-solve problems! 

Here's to many fun and splashy summers at the pool for our sweet Cate!

 

**I created the mermaid painting above in my art journal this summer, using Decoart acrylic paints, micron pens, a couple of collage pieces I'd painted, and Aartx acrylic paint markers. I think it came out kinda cute!