swim lessons.

Isn’t it weird how one moment can change your life forever?

And how your life is actually kind of made up of loads of life changing one-moments?

I mean, you don’t really know it at the time, or you do, but you can’t really wrap your brain around it.

And as parents we are watching those moments happen practically every day.

When I think about this for too long, I begin to feel as if I’m swimming in water way too deep for me.

And it’s funny that I use a swimming metaphor because it’s last week’s swim lessons that got me started thinking like this in the first place.

Two weeks ago London and Mosely were average swimmers.

We were swimming at our cousin Sherry’s pool and I watched them both as they played and splashed.

Mosely wouldn’t enter the four and a half foot pool without the aid of her life jacket.  London held her nose and never went under without goggles.

They had fun.  They loved the water.  But they certainly weren’t confident.  And they weren’t free.

Enter two weeks of swim lessons.

And then today – visiting our friend Mandy’s neighborhood pool –  I watched two completely different eight-year-old girls swim around in the “deep” end.

London didn’t hold her nose.

Mosely jumped off the side right into the deeper water wearing just her Hello Kitty swim suit.

London swam the pool’s width, arms outstretched over her head, coming up for breaths every few yards.

The girls never left the deeper end of the pool and never complained about needing goggles or floating devices.

They were different.

It was a life-changing day for them.

A life-altering two weeks.

And maybe they’ll remember the swim lessons.  (London Eli was pretty traumatized by the stress of the head-under part of the lessons, so it might stick in her brain a little longer.)

But the truth is – they won’t really think of their lives in terms of – the time before I knew how to swim and the time after I knew how to swim.

It won’t seem like that big of a deal.

But it was a huge deal this week.

And although swimming well will quickly be a feat they regularly take for granted, there was a defined moment in time when they simply couldn’t do it.  When it seemed impossible.

And then, just as suddenly, it was conquered.

And in this one small way, my daughters’ lives will not be the same.

Their young lives are constantly being altered,

life-changing moment by life-changing moment.

And I’m just here to bear witness.