Isn't that a positive headline? I think it's great! Here's a link to the story. What a wonderful little boy! He couldn't get his sister out of the pool alone, but he was able to keep her head above water until mom showed up to help.
One of the first things you can do as a parent in Quebec is take your little one to swimming lessons at a very young age. Children LOVE to play in water. The more swimming lessons they attend, the more they become aware of water safety and the least likely you are to have one of your precious offspring drown. Also my reasoning is that there aren't tons of activities you can do with a very young child, but taking them to swimming lessons and swimming with them is something fun for both.
I took mine to swimming lessons around 8 months old to a mom-tot swimming lesson. I used to enjoy it. You teach your baby how to hold his breath to go under water! The only scare I had was when the youngest was 2 1/2. We were at the company pool and I had the presence of mind to keep her swimming belt on her around the pool at all times, even when she wasn't in the water. Originally the belt had 4 floaters, and I would remove them as the child swam more and more on her own. It gave the children a sense of swimming alone without risking of drowning, of course under adult supervision.
Well one fine summer day, with a belt with just one floater left she ran, tripped and fell into the pool. I was just a few feet away and by the time I reached her, barely 1 minute later, she was pulling herself out of the pool a little shaken. Because she had her floater and knew how to swim well with it, she took her head out of the water, caught her breath and proceeded to reach the side to climb out.
Of course the same daughter now is a lifeguard at the DDO civic centre and has already taught a whole slew of kids water safety, and trained all the current staff!
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Entry from my Xanga blog 3 years ago:
ReplyDeleteSaturday, December 06, 2008
The Pond
One fresh spring day - you know the kind; it's finally warm enough that you don't need your jacket.. just a really warm wool sweater knitted by your grandmother and maybe you're a bit cold but hey, you're seven years old and your sister is six. You're tough and no wind chill scares you. My sister and I went wandering in the woods behind the apartment complex where we lived. When you're a kid, everything seems much much taller, the trees, the fence, the path. The pond. It's really a sort of ditch where snow accumulates in the winter. Finally when the snow melts in the spring thaw, there's what, about four feet of very cold water? Four feet, which when you are about four feet tall, seems really more like ten feet deep. I take the log to get across, which is about one foot wide. My sister decides skating across the one inch thick ice is a terrific idea, and does so without problem. However when we return across the ice, it is a different story completely. I take the log once more and my sister skates across the ice, but in the middle of the pond the ice cracks and she is submerged. I start scream nonsensical things like "Oh no my sister my only sister!" instead of perhaps going to try to help her, which would seem logical since I know how to swim. Luckily she does too, thanks to swimming lessons, and she quickly escapes the pond. Hopefully my actions that day don't reflect how I would act in a life threatening situation now at twenty-one, though I hope I never encounter one.
When we arrived back at the apartment, our mother's boyfriend at the time helped my sister dry her clothes and change into other clothes. My mom was oblivious to this near disaster until possibly nine to ten years later, when my sister and I confessed to this whole affair during an amical conversation during our last years of high school. When I think about it now, I often wonder if it was a dream, because the memory seems so vivid. The color of the leaves, the dim lighting in the woods, the smell of forest pond. I can hear myself yelling and see her struggling in the pond. I remember she was wearing overalls maybe? but she often did, so I can't tell. Maybe I dreamt of it afterwards, and the dream has confused the memory. Did it really happen? it must have, since my sister recalls the event as well. Memory is a strange thing. When asked if she remembered being cold, my sister said she was too busy escaping the pond to recall and even later on the long two minute walk home she was likely more afraid of what waited at home then to realize she was frozen. I don't believe we ever went on a frozen pond again. Ever.
My sister has been a lifeguard for three years now....
I forgot about this, because of course my LOSER bf of the time didn't bother telling me. My child could have died but he was too much of a moron to say anything.
ReplyDeleteObviously she ran home and never had chance to get too cold otherwise she could have gotten pneumonia.