Thank You!

I started writing the SwimSchoolBob blog a few years ago, experimenting with sharing some thoughts that wandered through my mind in my day-to-day life as a husband,  parent of eight, swim teacher, small business owner and a reader of a wide variety of stuff (Kathy says “junk”).

The response has been so great that we are moving the blog to a legitimate, full-blown but not too fancy SwimSchoolBob web site to host my thoughts and some other things that people have asked me to share --- you know --- the usual stuff like books, movies, music, food, parenting ideas AND some other stuff that may not have anything to do with anything but that I think is kind of fun.

So I invite you to (please) come on over and subscribe to the new SwimSchoolBob blog. By subscribing below, you’ll continue to receive updates with new posts. To visit the new blog and and subscribe to ensure you keep getting these occasional thought provoking blurbs, find it here:

http://blog.hubbardswim.com/

There will be no future updates from this current blog.

Thank you! See you in my new cyberspace.

 

Bob Hubbard

Where Does Pool Safety Start?

To keep your children safe around water, start outside the pool!!!


Safe Kids reports that in 63% of drowning cases, the victims entered the pool through an open or unlatched gate! If you have a pool or even are at a party or visiting a home with a pool, you need to ensure that the pool gate is locked. Do not count on the host to confirm that the gate is locked. If you are at home with a pool that does not have a fence and you have toddlers, you need to either leave or tie your children to your waist so they do not wander away from you.

Are You Taking Time To Be Selfish?

I posted a photo on my Facebook page last week of myself with our 5th daughter as she headed off to her high school prom. It prompted me to think that I had been sending kids off to proms over three decades. Whew, that is a lot of great memories.

This week I was reflecting on that experience, as I heard a young couple discuss the stress that they were feeling with an eighteen-month-old toddler in their home. I had made some comment that I was planning on doing something, attending a concert or trying a new restaurant for dinner. They responded with what my good friend Bruce Sullivan in Australia calls “whingeng”. That is an expression of fatigue and disappointment of how difficult life is etc. They got caught up in describing how they had no time for themselves with a toddler in their life.

Does Your Waiter Know Your Name?

How many times have you sat down at a table in a restaurant and the fresh faced waiter or waitress comes over and says …. “Hello, I am Tracy and I will be serving you tonight”? Often times, that is information that passes in one ear and out the other.  No eye contact by either the waiter or yourself.

On the other hand how do you feel when you walk into a place and to quote the old Cheers TV slogan … “Everyone knows your name?”

By the nature of our lifestyle and time of life, we eat out a lot. We gravitate back to favorite places time and time again. Often the food is very, very good. But most often, we frequent places where we are greeted by name or in a special place the waiter or bartender may inquire whether we would enjoy a specific beverage or appetizer, since they know our tastes and habits.

Play, A Lost Art

Welcome to the New Year. Honestly have had a bit of writer’s block over the past few months, ok more than a few, months. I finally found the topic to get me writing again. PLAY or, rather, the lack of it in our children’s and our own lives!

Our kids are living in very structured worlds where they go to swim lessons, soccer practice, piano lessons, and after-school math tutors. Whew! I remember heading out the door after school when the only rule in our Brooklyn neighborhood was to be back by dinnertime. I know times are different today but I do think that we, as parents, are over-reacting and over-structuring our kids.  As a kid, when we played basketball, there were no coaches, no time clock, and no audience of parents to assess our performance. We played shirts and skins. When one game was over, if no one was waiting on the sideline to join the next game, we'd reshuffle the teams,  re-balance the game and start anew.

Time for Parents to Explore Underwater !!! Lesson One.

Are you a nervous swimmer? Are you among the 65% of adults who are uncomfortable if you were in water over your head? Do you swim across your pool with the idea that if you stopped swimming you would sink?

Here at the swim school, we often find that when we have a nervous child, we can usually find that one of their parents is also a nervous swimmer. So here is my remedy and recommendations for some things for YOU, mom and dad or even grandma or grandpa to practice at home. Please do not feel foolish in admitting your nervousness. Research shows that a parent's anxiety in anything is transferred to the child through subliminal messages in body position, voice inflections or even facial expressions. Do you sit with your arms crossed hunching forward during your child's swim lessons? Have you ever told your child he or she almost drowned when they went under for periods as brief as two or three seconds. Do you scrunch your face up as you work to submerge your child?

Summer Swim Tips for Home

We work hard with the young swimmers AND THEIR PARENTS all year long at our swim school. Often at this time of year, we see the kids coming back into the pool with some bad habits. MMMM, we wonder, where did they learn that? SO in an effort to keep those swimming skills up when the weather is warm and to give our parents some hints on what to do at home, we are offering up our Top Ten Tips for Home!

1. Headed for the backyard pool? Give the kids time to warm up and have fun and then work on their swimming skills. Ten minutes of “teaching” is enough – you’ll be surprised what a big difference that will make.