little swimmer

This weekend Drew, Asher, and I headed down the road to celebrate the graduation of Drew's cousin, Peter.  The thing we love most about living in our new hometown is being close enough to family to celebrate these special occasions!

Drew's Aunt Carol and Uncle Ron were kind enough to invite us to Peter's graduation party, so we grabbed our swimsuits and hit the road.  It was such a hot day we were really looking forward to cooling off in the pool.  Since it was going to be Asher's first time in a pool he and I went shopping on Friday for a hat to keep the sun off.

After a lot of searching we found this great sun hat on super sale at Janie and Jack.  Asher wasn't thrilled with being a model at this point, but that's ok.  He wore it like a champ the next day!

On Saturday afternoon we had a great time eating way too much food and catching up with all of Drew's cousins.  After Asher's nap we got him lathered up with sunblock and put him in his little swimsuit for a dip in the big pool.  This guy loves his bath time, so I assumed he'd like swimming just fine.  I planned to hold him the whole time and just float around a little.

Well, he hated it.

Really, really hated it.

Like cried the whole time kind of hated it.

In his defense, I don't think it was the actual swimming that he despised.  Carol and Ron have 8 children, who almost all have kids of their own by this point, so the pool was really busy and noisy with little kids having tons of fun.  Asher lives with me in our relatively quiet home most of the time, so I think he got really overwhelmed by all of the action. 

This same thing happened at the Little Gym last week.  Asher did well at first, but once the class filled up and started to get noisy with all the other kiddos he freaked out and wouldn't stop crying.  My sensitive little guy.

After I got out of the pool and held him so he couldn't see the other kids he calmed right down.  In fact, he clung to me like a drowning man.  Poor little guy!

Drew and I decided to get out his little pool yesterday to see if we could convince him that swimming is fun.  We got him back in his suit and let him splash around for awhile.  Just like on Saturday, he cried at first, but then settled down to play.  It became much more like bath time and he loved splashing around.

Hopefully we'll be able to head back down soon to try out the "big pool" again when things are a little quieter.  I really want him to embrace swimming before we go to the beach at the end of August!  The house we're renting has a pool and I think Asher could really have some fun floating around!

We'll take it slow and see what happens!