My son learned how to blow bubbles last week. In the bathtub, not a pool, because who wants to haul a kid to swimming lessons and back home again when it’s -20. It was momentous and we cheered and cheered, all four of us clapping and high five-ing in our tiny bathroom. It is already one of the highlights of my year. (Also, he's currently reading "Swimming Swimming" to himself, though he really just skips through the swimming pages until he gets to the page where the characters eat ice cream).

Though he just figured out how to blow bubbles, he somehow passed swimming lessons in the early days of December. It was the first time I didn’t take him and, I admit, it was a relief, not having to confront my deep love of swimming with his ambivalence that teetered on a full rejection...but he went, every week with my fella and they’d sing songs and dunk themselves under the water to varying degrees of upset and they’d come home and we’d all eat grilled cheese sandwiches with pickles for lunch.

My comfort is that I also was ambivalent about swimming as a young kid. I distinctly remember the claustrophobic heat of Memorial Pool, the sheer terror of having to make it all the way across to the other side of Park Lawn Pool, my complete inability to tread water (I failed Red at least 3 times). 

In fact in 1985, I "could not muster up enough endurance to complete the distance requirement", and baaaaaarely passed Pre-School 5 with, and I quote: "Lindsay must continue to work hard to further develop her endurance on her front."

Look at me now, Andrew Solomon (who is probably now in his mid-50s), I want to say as I spend every free waking minute I have swimming. Look at my hours-long front crawl! 

And so, instead of celebrating check marks on a report card, I remind myself that blowing bathtub bubbles is far more important...

Related: a high school chum promised her daughter a badge for this round of swimming lessons, only to learn there aren’t badges! (GASP, THE HORROR!) so she commissioned me to make a penguin badge. I can’t wait till report card day!

The last day of swimming lessons always loomed large. There would be no treading water or long swims, no head-tilt-chin-lifts on the deck, just diving for nickels and gold coins in the deep end and playing frozen tag in the shallow end. All fun and games until the last few moments where you'd stand, shivering on the deck, waiting for the instructor to call your name and hand you your report card, thick with a badge stapled to the inside corner, or crushingly thin if you hadn't passed.

It has been years – 20 to be exact – since I passed my last swimming class, and I was surprised to feel that same rush of equal parts excitement and nervousness on Tuesday for my son's final class. Granted, he's not even 2, we only made it to 4 lessons (which, just so we're clear I see as Victory x4) and it took him a while to get comfortable in the water each time, but he did! It was incredible how much his comfort level grew – he jumped in more than once and went all the way under water! He learned to blow bubbles! And kick! Now, when he sees illustrations of pools, he says "I jump!" And when we talk about swimming, he jumps. "Swimming! I jump!" Huge wins. All of them.

So imagine my disappointment when not only did he not get a badge, he didn't even get a report card. Bah! Not cool, instructor, not okay (and yes, I'm following up with the facility...!)

He might not have gotten an official badge, but he got a badge – a handmade one to go with the one he got last fall – because jumping in and blowing bubbles need to be both commemorated and celebrated!

(Pssst: If you know a kid, or adult, who needs an LZV-embroidered badge, head over here. I love nothing more than making badges to celebrate accomplishments big and small!)