Sunday, April 20, 2008

Fear of swimming


Summer is here and the swimming pool is filled with children and adults. It’s exciting as most of them come around to chat in the pool while others swim to shape up. When Adi was 4 year old, I had enrolled him for swimming classes. It was a bad decision as he began to develop a fear of drowning when he was thrown into the pool. After that he never dared to enter the pool until recently. He is 6 year old now and all set to savor water again. The core factor that led him to this decision was his lack of company to play in the play area since all his friends were busy enjoying the pool. At the outset he just watched them swim. Next he put his legs into the pool and felt the water. The following day he had joined the rest. It took him barely a week to discover the art of swimming and now he is on his way to stand out. Today when I went down to pick him back, I watched him doing somersaults inside the pool and I was pleasantly amazed. Now I presume that it will be hard to stop him just as it was hard to start off.
Now let me come the spicy part of the matter. A small number of of us ladies who don’t know to swim decided to give it a shot. Initially, most of us were not comfortable in our swimsuits. So we chose late evening to pursue our interest. 6 of us got into the pool and that was when we knew what adi must have felt like when he was 4 year old. The fear sank in but hey am not ready to give up yet.

Thursday, April 10, 2008


Just as I was thinking that we may have to spend another lazy Sunday at home, my sis calls me up at 8 A.M and says “hey lets go to wonder la”. It is an amusement park located on the Bangalore-Mysore highway and it takes an hour from our home by car to get there with clear traffic. Excitement was mounting up and I was contemplating if it would be sensible to take atul along. Finally after much thinking, we decided to leave atul in my mom’s place. It was our first long distance outing after a long gap and a much welcome change. I quickly packed atul’s things, got his bottles prepared and all of us got dressed in less than an hour and we were out by 9 a.m. We dropped atul at my mums and hit the road. It was a pleasurable drive to worder la and as we were approaching the place, the monkeys inside us were getting edgy. My son started the wonder la tune as he kept jumping inside the car. It’s a beatutiful place with the right blend of greenery and contemporary look. As we got into the park, we were taken aback seeing the vast crowd. There was a long queue in front of the counter. But thankfully they were moving fast. We got our tickets and entered in and then our adventure began. First we decided to try out a ride called aaaaaaaaaahh…True to its name we were AAAAaaaaa….ayiooooh ….after the ride and I decide to abandon the rest of the rides. But after much coaxing , my hub convinced me for the ride which was called the crazy wagon . True to its name it swung us high up in the air in a pendulum motion and I felt like my organs were almost making its way outta my mouth .Finally I screamed my way out of that place. By now our stomach was beckoning us for a refill and we decided to have lunch. My sis and family had not yet arrived , so we could afford a leisure lunch and they could catch up with us. The restaurants in the park looked promising by look but unfortunately not many appealing things on the menu. When we were almost done, we saw our sis family approaching us and now the real fun was about to initiate. My sis has two sons, a 10 year old and a 3 year old. Together we experimented most of the dry rides and now we were all set for the wet rides, which was the highlight of the park. We started off with the wonder splash where the train went chuk chuk uphill and crudely came crashing down into a pool of water . That got us suitably dressed for the pool . We all dived into the pool and pretended to swim with the tube on. Then we hit the dance floor called the rain dance where artificial rains are generated with the music on. We rocked it!! Next on the agenda were the thrilling, heart clenching, dangerous slides down to a pool of water. Three of them and I dared try all. It was AWESOME. We din’t know how time flied and it was late evening by the time we covered atleast half the area . Time to get back home and tired as we were, it was a quiet ride back . We picked Atul and went back home to hit the bed only to dream of when our next visit would be.