having a swimming pool in our front yard has been a lot of fun. especially for nayou. he’s in there almost every day and his confidence in the water has increased dramatically. usually he’s in there with his floaties, but recently he’s been going in with just one floatie, or testing the waters (pun intended) with no swimming aids. on wednesday we went for a swim at a pool up the road and nayou decided to start swimming all by himself! it was truly amazing to watch him do this start to go further and further as he became more confident.

for me its been interesting as a parent to learn to trust nayou and let him implement changes when he wants to. the urge to “coach” him with swimming was quite strong but i purposely held back and he did it all by himself. likewise with the breastfeeding – in the last month he has completely weaned himself without any prompting from brenda or myself. these days with all this talk of percentiles and milestones and blah blah blah its easy to get caught up in comparisons with other kids, but this was another reminder to trust nayou and trust the process to unfold as it will. the lesson for me though is not to shower him with praise when he does things like this, lest he start to do certain things for the praise rather than for the love of it. but, its hard not to get excited when you see your son take his first strokes 🙂