Underwater friendship and a rainbow wish

Today we wrapped up our first week of swim lessons at Psalmond Road pool and this year, for the first time, both kids are loving every minute of it and swimming like fish, rather than crying in fear, refusing to do things like put their heads under water, or demoting themselves to toddler classes because they'd rather swim with their parents.

Will in particular was having a golden sort of day. He learned to do frog kicks and back floats for the first time and had a halfway reasonable looking crawl stroke going even if he hasn’t yet figured out how to breathe between strokes. And after a week of telling me, “there this girl I’d really like to meet,” he finally talked with his swim lesson classmate. I think the allure here may have been that she’s pretty brave in the water, willing to go under – but who knows.

Anyway this is how he described it: “It reminded me of Charlie Brown and the little red-headed girl. The way that I met her is that I went under water when she went under water and I looked at her with my goggles. I didn’t talk to her. She talked to me first… I always sat by her. She also looked like a very kind and sweet lady.”

Then on the way home, Will said in an almost whining voice, “When am I ever going to see a rainbow? When I’m ever going to see a rainbow?”

He’d asked the same question a couple days ago on our way home from swim lessons, and I’d told him then that you don’t see rainbows as often in Georgia as you do in Colorado because there are so many trees all around so it’s hard to see as much of the sky. But this time, less than two seconds after he posed his rainbow question, Rob and I looked to the left and saw a nice big rainbow just waiting to be admired.

Will couldn’t stop smiling and laughing at that little miracle.

"I just can’t believe it," he said. "I just said it, and it happened. It was so silly.”

Then he asked us, “What do you think happened?”

I turned the question back on him, and he said, “It might have been like a wish – like a real wish come true.”