Phoebe in the pool

Phoebe is fairly convinced that she can swim—and she's not entirely wrong. She's really doing fairly well. The one thing she can't quite do is...breathe...which I think is a fairly important part of swimming. 

I've been working on teaching her how to flip onto her back but she hates it. She tends to growl one of a number of predetermined responses:

a) NO! *incoherent grumblings*
b) UGH! MOM!
c) Me gonna drown! (or sometimes "I am gonna drown!" or just "I/me drowning")
d) Me already breeved! 

The solution to drowning is obviously to get off her back and plunge her face back into the water, right? Silly kid. I keep explaining that she needs to learn how to relax and feel comfortable on her back in order to be a competent swimmer. She does not believe me, but she's making progress.

She doesn't like to rest on her back, though, because I told her she needed to flip to her back to breathe...and if she takes one breath, then she's good to go again, right? And, like, that's true for competitive—or even simply fluent—swimming. But I'd really like her to be capable of flipping onto her back and relaxing and breathing before flipping onto her stomach to continue swimming (rather than depending on me to lift her face out of the water). 

We worked really hard today and got her to be somewhat...chill...on her back. Here she is singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" for me (once she was done with the song she'd be allowed to flip back onto her tummy, see? so she was really rushing through it):

Here are a few more videos of Phoebe working on her swimming. Sometimes she jumps in to swim to me. Sometimes she decides to swim to the ladder (we're working on reaching to grab the pool ledge, but she can't quite do that yet). She wants to swim all day—diving, doing "bolphin" kicks, riding on Mommy's back, rescuing beetles...