Swimming Through the Planets

Last time I posted we talked about sun spots and Dexter's apparent conquering of them.  Which turned out to be not entirely true.  He was no longer scared of the sun spots in the water.  But the ones on the ceiling still freaked him out.  So he was still having a tough time at swim lessons.

I saw Ms Dana last week at the gym.  Dexter's lovely, patient, kind, understanding swim teacher for over a year when he was in preschool.  I had sent her a message through a mutual friend about Dexter's sun spot success.  And she thanked me for the message when I saw her last week, and proceeded to tell me that her family thought she was nuts because she read my message in the middle of her kitchen while fixing dinner and immediately burst in to tears.  This is why I adore her.

And this is the message I sent to her today:

Ms Dana,

Know how I told you last week that Dexter was still having trouble swimming near or under the sun spots on the ceiling? Well, his therapist had the brilliant idea to name the sun spots. And since he talks about nothing but outer space these days, he decided to name the sun spots after planets. Big ones would be called Jupiter, smaller ones Mars and Mercury, etc.

It was a lovely sunny day to test out his new friendly sun spots this afternoon. And after some initial trepidation - HE DID IT! He totally swam under Neptune. He absolutely swam through Mars. And Miss Clara still had to go up the stairs with him to the top of the slide, because that's getting pretty close to planet Neptune up there, but she walked up with him and he slid down and he did AWESOME. Such a better experience for him! He was tremendously proud.

We saw Ali after his lesson and told her about his awesome swimming, and how we were going to get dressed and go to Dairy Queen for ice cream. Because swimming under a planet DEFINITELY deserves an ice cream cone!

Loved seeing you last week! Thank you for caring so much about my quirky little guy.

Alissa

I don't really know what word is bigger than monumental. Whatever it is, that's what kind of afternoon we had. I took a video of Dexter swimming in the deep end during his swim lesson (something not previously attempted because of sun spots). And when Dex got back to the shallow end and looked over to me I gave him two thumbs up and cheered for him. And then I turned around and cried. It was that kind of day.

Behold, Dexter swimming through the planets:

Click here for video