16 Months Old - 25ths!

Over the last month, our baby boy has become a walker.  As is the developmental norm for Jack, one day he was crawling, the next he was fully walking.   He seems to improve every day and now chooses to walk whenever possible.  He's also become more comfortable walking on uneven surfaces, like the wood-chipped ground at the playground.  It still takes me by surprise to see him walking across a room.

This past Friday was Jack's last swim class for the shrimp level, which is for babies six to 18 months old. I do think Jack enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to signing up for the next level - Perch - when he's 18 months. The one dark spot on the swim class is what I now refer to as "the drop". The half hour class consisted primarily of singing nursery rhymes while bouncing the babies in and out of the water. But at the end of class, the teacher brought out a plastic slide, which was set up on the side of the deep end of therapeutic pool (only 4 ft deep). The teacher would then push the little ones down the slide into mum's arms. Ideally. Each time Jack went down the slide, I would fear not catching him. He was at least 10 lbs heavier than all the other babies, which made catching him while he flew through the air at my face a challenge. I'm sure someone prone to psycho-analyzing would say that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy when I did actually "miss" catching Jack as he was pushed particularly fast down the slide. When I saw that he was going to be going down the slide at a faster rate, I scrambled to back up and turned my ankle a bit on the raised drain on the bottom of the pool. By the time I had righted myself, Jack had plunged straight into the water eliciting gasps from the rest of the class. I assume he was only under water for a second before I lifted him out, but it felt much longer. Jack didn't cry, but I she's a year or two over the fact that I hadn't caught my poor child. My one job was to catch him, and I wasn't able to do that. Following "the drop", I had nightmares at night, and re-lived the awful occurrence over and over during the day. Perhaps the worst part was the mortification I felt as I imagined the other mothers going home and saying to their friends and significant others, "Guess what happened in swim class today!? A mother DROPPED her baby in the pool. I mean, her one job was to catch her child at the bottom of a teeny, tiny slide, yet she just let that baby sail right into the water. He was ONLY 15 months!" I'm not sure why this aspect bothered me as much as the action itself, but I think I'm always somewhat afraid that I don't really possess that maternal instinct that separates the great parents from the adequate ones. I know I'm a good mother to Jack, but I have to work at it, do research, ask opinions, and still second-guess a lot of my decisions. Unfortunately I never did get him back on that slide in the remaining two classes. One of the other mothers asked if Jack was still recovering and I realized that I was the one still recovering. We'll see how I feel when Jack is 18 months.