thankful#140: kinsley's improvement in the pool

I've struggled with not being up in Portland for swim lessons that I feel are really useful: safety-based and teaching the kids to really protect themselves. The classes at the YMCA have been more for keeping the girls comfortable in the water and I work with them as much as I can to try to advance their actual swimming skills. The classes themselves don't do much in the way of teaching them to actually swim. But just in the last week or so Kinsley has really taken off! She's been able to touch the bottom now for about a month, which makes it hard to MAKE her swim - she just stands up. But now she will throw her legs up and REALLY SWIM! She'll swim five or six feet all on her own! And yesterday she actually did a pillow head for about two minutes, completely on her own and I didn't even ask her to do it! Usually she fights the pillow heads and wants to just swim from the wall, but she did it all by herself. It was such a relief to see that she's actually able to do it. And when I got super excited about it she became more willing to do more of it ... at least for that class. But it is encouraging to see that she is really improving, despite the fact that I'm not trained and really don't know what I'm doing and just working with her the best that I can. She's doing awesome.