Learning to swim

My kid loves the water. She is taking lessons at Tacoma's Eastside Pool, the only pool in the area with Saturday lessons for children her age, as well as the one with the cheapest rates. She took their tot class last summer, and is now in their Level 1 swim class.

We attended a birthday pool party for one of her friends on Sunday. My daughter turned down eating lunch so she could stay in the water, came out of the pool long enough to sing happy birthday to her friend, and then jumped right back in.

I really want her to learn how to swim, in part because I can't. You may have heard about the six teens who drowned in Shreveport, LA last week when they jumped into a river to cool off from the oppressive heat. This article about the tragedy is one of many that notes that nearly 70% of black children in the U.S. can't swim, compared to only 42% of white children, and that African-Americans drown at much higher rates than do whites.

There are many reasons for the racial disparity in swimming ability, including historical segregation and current poverty which made and make it difficult or impossible to have access to pools and opportunities to learn to swim. Add to that the fear factor: when adults never had the chance to learn to swim, they are more likely to be fearful of the water and thus not allow their children to go near it.

My first opportunity in the water occurred when I was seven and my mother signed me up for lessons at the YMCA. There had to be at least fifty children in the class, so the instructors had no time to give individual attention to anyone. Instead, they demonstrated and explained certain techniques, and you either got it or you didn't. I learned to hold my breath under water in that class. (Even in my daughter's class, which only has ten kids, there is little time for individual attention. The instructor works with each child for about three or four minutes, while the rest of the kids play in the water).

My next chance occurred in seventh grade, when I took a semester of swimming as part of gym class. However, the swim teacher was a diabetic who was going through some serious complications, and he missed most of the semester. The substitute who replaced him declared each class "open swim," so we were never taught anything. A friend of mine taught me how to float in that class.

In tenth grade, I also had a chance to take a semester of swimming as part of gym. The swim teacher was well-known as an excellent instructor. But early in the semester, a kid lit up a cigarette in the gym, tossed it on a mat and set the place on fire. The gym, a separate building from the school, had so much smoke damage that they had to close it down for the remainder of the year. We spent the rest of our gym periods doing calisthenics in the basement of the school until it was warm enough to play a few sports outside. I never again had room in my school schedule (high school or college) to take gym.

The rest of my family can swim, but they all learned as adults. After her children were grown and out of the house, my mother signed up for swimming lessons and kept taking them until she learned. My dad and brother both learned to swim in the military. My sister learned to swim in college. Lucky woman, she could take swimming as a credit elective at her university. I didn't have that option.

As an adult, I never took independent swim classes because, I hate to admit, I was worried about my hair. When relaxed hair gets wet it tends to frizz up, which doesn't look so hot when you're a working professional. Straightening it out again requires several hours involving dryers, flat irons and curling irons. As such, swimming lessons seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

During the few times over the years I had the chance to get into a pool, I taught myself how to kick while floating, and I can make it across the shallow end of the pool that way. Still, that's hardly competent swimming. My husband, on the other hand, used to be a lifeguard.

So here's hoping that my daughter's love of the water will continue, and that she will become an expert swimmer. And perhaps her mother will, too. Learning to swim is not a hair challenge anymore, since I no longer relax my hair and don't care if it gets wets, but it is a time and schedule challenge. I would love nothing more, however, than being able to join my daughter in the water.

Another item for the wish list

In keeping with the concept of buying used, saving money, AND saving water, I have a new item for my wish list: a used rain barrel from Eagle Peak. Rain barrels obviously allow you to collect and store rain water, which you can then use to water your lawn or garden. Many rain barrels cost upwards of $100, and sometimes as much as $200-300, which is way out of our price range. Friends of ours in Seattle have a rain barrel which cost them $25, because the city subsidizes the cost for residents. No such benefit is available in Tacoma.

Recently, I decided to visit Amazon to do some comparison shopping and find their cheapest rain barrels. The best deals were by a company called Eagles Peak, whose new barrels sell for about $80. However, when I visited their web site, they sell used barrels very inexpensively (as low as $17.50 for a plain barrel, to up to $58 for a rain barrel system that includes a drain spout hookup and a basket to filter debris). It's still on the wish list for now (we are really broke), but at least I know I have options.

Earth Day, thrift shopping, and water hauling (again)

Last Wednesday was Earth Day and I didn't post, because I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do for it until this weekend.

For most of my adult life, I scorned environmentalism, because I mistakenly thought it was about saving the whales or the trees, but not people. I was never an animal lover either; my parents never let us have pets, except for goldfish, I'm allergic to cats, and I've been bitten on several occasions by dogs.

It was only when I was pregnant and learning about the environmental threats to fetuses, babies and young children, that I began to realize that caring about the environment IS caring about people. Humans reap the consequences of environmental damage just like the rest of nature.

A next step in my journey, I think, is to care as much about the rest of nature as I care about people. I'll never become one of those environmentalists who think that humanity should just die out to save the rest of the planet, but I am growing in my understanding that the rest of creation is valuable in its own right and worthy of concern.

I'd like my daughter to have a greter appreciation for nature than I did, so I decided that I wanted to buy a bird feeder so she could watch birds in our yard. I was partly inspired by catching sight of a blue jay in our yard last week, which flew away before my daughter was able to see it.

I was able to purchase a bird feeder for $7 at Value Village (cue my plug for the National Thrift Store Month petition!). My daughter had a ball playing with the wild bird seed we purchased and pouring it into the feeder, and her dad helped her tie it to a tree. So now we're just waiting to see if we get any visitors. The bird food bag says to be patient, it may take a few weeks for the birds to realize it's there.

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Update on water hauling: Dear Daughter no longer uses her hamper (also purchased at Value Village thrift store!) for her dirty clothes, since she discovered that she can turn it over and use it to climb upon and reach for things. (She now uses a cardboard box instead). So I left her bathwater in the tub last night, and this morning, I took her hamper, filled it with the tub water using the bathroom wastebasket, and carried it outside to water the trees, shrubs and flowers in the front yard. It took me three trips and about a half hour. Hubby saw me and said, "That's weird. Cute, but weird!" :) But hey, if it helps save water and helps our plants, it's worth it. I just have to stay motivated to do it, because I could easily get lazy about it.

Because hauling water is too much work for anybody

No Impact Man is my favorite environmental blog, one that has provided much inspiration on my own green journey. The blogger, Colin Beavan, along with his wife and daughter (same age as my own), spent a year trying to make as little impact on the environment as they could, while living in New York City. After the year was up, they evaluated their experiences and decided which modern conveniences they wanted back, and which ones they would continue to live without. They chose to continue to live without TV or air conditioning, deciding that those were luxuries, not necessities.

They chose to bring the washing machine back as a necessity. As Colin explained it, doing laundry by hand is drudgery, and therefore some sort of equipment to make laundering easier is a necessity, not just for wealthy Westerners, but for everyone on the planet.

I got a sense of this yesterday. I was doing laundry, including handwashing several dry-clean only items in the bathtub. (See Ask Annie on how to wet-clean dry-clean only clothing). I washed the items with castille soap, a very mild natural liquid soap, leaving me with gray water when I was finished. Gray water is water that is dirty, but not toxic.

I've read several green tips that suggest recycling gray water by using it to water plants.* Since we're trying to take care of the yard now and we haven't had much rain lately, I decided to try this. After about six trips in which I carried a bucket and my daughter a watering can, we'd only watered a few plants in the yard, the tub was still full, and we were tired. To finish the job might take several hours.

I'm not sure whether those who recommend using gray water this way are talking about watering a couple of houseplants, as opposed to your landscape; and I don't think I've ever read any suggestions about easy ways to haul the water. In any case, I feel about hauling the way Colin feels about doing laundry by hand: it's drudgery for anybody.

In case you're thinking about the fact that in many places in the world, people have to haul water or else they have none: this is true, but it is also why many non-governmental agencies work to provide such communities with close-at-hand, easily accessible water sources, because hauling water is so much work. In places where hauling water is necessary, generally it's women and girls who do it, preventing the women from doing other productive work, and keeping the girls out of school. Most NGO's also know that one of the best ways to help a community rise from poverty is to make sure the women can earn a living and the girls can go to school. So unless I can figure out a better way to move this gray water,** I don't think I'll be using it to water the plants in the yard anymore.

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* Some people recycle gray water by using it to flush their toilet. If you pour enough water into a toilet bowl, the pressure will force anything in the bowl down. An advantage to this method is that if the gray water is from the tub, you don't have to haul it anywhere.

** Given the fact that water shortages are a real problem in some places now, and maybe everywhere in the not-too-distant future, it might behoove me to try to find a better way to haul it.