I'll start with Kate because she was the easier of the two!:) Since she's done 2 years already, she worked mostly on her strokes. She also revisited her "accident" drills to show Mr. Kem that she knows what to do in the event of an emergency. Kate did awesome this year! She is able to swim the crawl stroke and the backstroke, she is working on her breathing underwater, and Mr. Kem deemed her "drown proof!" On the last day she dove to the bottom of the deep end to retrieve a golf ball and did a cannon ball through the air. She graduated and doesn't need Mr. Kem's lessons anymore. Pretty impressive for a 5 year old!
Onto Maggie...she did great considering she was scared. Maggie is not as brave in the water as Kate is so she continually told Mr. Kem that she was afraid and a "scaredy cat." Her first few days were rough and by Wednesday I was convinced that she would need more than the normal 5 days of lessons. But Mags stepped it up and by Friday she could be thrown in the pool and get herself into the "starfish" which is the safe floating position. That girl has some determination! She still doesn't love to swim and we definitely have to keep working with her when we swim together but she's good until next summer's lessons.
I'm super proud of both Kate and Maggie! Mr. Kem makes them work extremely hard and there's some tough love going on during the process but they both rose to their challenges and did great!
