Savanna the swim instructor

 I found a few minutes tonight to go through our pictures from the island of Ambergris Caye.  We spent 6 nights here.  It is truly a paradise.  White sand, palm trees and the 90-degree water of the Caribbean right outside our door.

A lot of things happened while we were in the town of San Pedro, but I'll just post a quick one tonight.

When we arrived in Belize, Zachary couldn't swim.  He wouldn't even get in the pool without a life jacket.  And even then it was all he could do to stay in the water for more than 10 seconds.  After the first 2 days at our hotel in Belize City, Zack was comfortable in his life jacket kicking and swimming all around the pool, no matter how deep the water was.  I thought that was as good as it was going to get.  Bt the time our other kids were 5, they were swimming like fish.  But Zack has always been a big chicken around water.  Not that there's anything wrong with that....just different than the other guys were.

Anyway, we swam every day we were in Belize, and at the hotel in San Ignacio Zack got more comfortable in the water, and would even put on a snorkel mask and put his head under the water.  Wow!  Could it get any better than that?

Well, it did.  In San Pedro he continued to love the water--but only if he wore his life jacket.  He was terrified of taking it off.  But whatever.  It was easy, he was happy, and I didn't have to worry too much about him around water when he had that jacket on.

And then one day Mark took the 5 oldest kids on an outing south on the island to look for crocodiles.  I stayed back at the pool with Savanna and Zack to read my book.  I sat in a chair in the super shallow part of the pool and read my book and watched Savanna hatch the perfect plan to get Zack to swim.

It turns out that this spunky little girl is an excellent swim instructor.

She gathered some little shells from the sand around the resort, and brought them to the shallow part of the pool.  When I say shallow, I mean like 10 inches deep.  She spread the shells around the floor of the pool, and then had Zack take off his life jacket and put on a mask where he would put his face in the water to see the shells.  She then showed him how to float and keep his face in the water to gather the shells.  It was very shallow, and Zack wasn't afraid at all.

Once he could gather all the shells from the shallow part, Savvy moved the shells down to the first step in the deeper part of the pool (the pool is only 4.5 feet deep at the center, by the way).  And then without a life jacket, Zack went into the bigger pool and started putting his head under the water  to gather the shells from the first step.

And then the second step.

And then the third step.

And then the bottom of the pool.

By the time Mark and the kids returned an hour later, they saw that the kid they had left wearing a life jacket was now diving to the bottom of the pool to get stuff.  Nobody could believe what he had just learned, and really couldn't believe that Savanna had done it all herself.

Zack then added his arms and kicking and floating and became a great swimmer instantly.  He spent the rest of our trip underwater as much as possible.

We filled an empty plastic pop bottle with water to use as a diving target.  Zack picked that bottle off the bottom of the pool at least 100 times that day.  Pretty much the coolest thing ever.

And then this random picture.  We played Boggle while we were there, and this is what Zachary wrote on his paper while the timer was going.