Learning to Swim Again!
Today was the reason that Mom and Dad decided to join us last minute.
B’s birthday was a few months prior to our trip and she had been on a big Ariel kick lately. On top of that, she loves to swim. Mom decided to do something a little bit different and special for her birthday, so she bought her a session for the Mermaid School offered on certain mornings at some of the resorts.
The only day we could get her scheduled for CBR, was Wednesday, so that’s what we went with.
Mermaid school starts at 8 am. They asked us to have B there by 7:45. We signed some paperwork and the instructors were being energetic and interacting with the kids as we waited for everyone to show up and the lesson to begin.
They took all the kids into the pool and had them sit on the steps. Each kid, one by one was asked to swim out to the instructors... some with assistance and/or were given a life jacket if needed. They did this to gauge the swimming ability and comfort of the mermaids. They were awesome about letting the stronger swimmers do their thing and offering as much help as they needed to some of the others. There were several little girls in this class and they ranged from a couple of them that looked like the water is their element and a couple that could not swim a lick. They were able to work with each of them individually and cater the experience to what they needed.
After seeing the girls swim and splitting them into 2 groups (1 group per instructor) they fitted each of them with a mermaid tail and taught them how to “land” on it if they needed to rest.
They spent time learning to swim in their tails, swimming through hoops and playing some little games with the instructors. The first 45 minutes were doing some specific games/tasks 1 on 1, 1 girl at a time with the instructors while the others sat on the step and watched. After everyone was adequately trained, they were allowed to spend the last 15 minutes swimming around in their tail and doing whatever they wanted to do.
The downside of the whole thing... they had 1 lifeguard, which meant that nobody was allowed to go past the cannons you see behind the instructors in some of the pictures below. So they had to basically swim in circles in a small section of the pool during their free swim time.
All in all, this was something that I’d highly recommend. I don’t remember the exact price (it was between $50-55 after taxes and everything), but it is a bargain if you have a Little Mermaid fan that loves to swim. The school is conducted by an outside contractor, so the instructors aren’t Disney employees. I wondered if that might leave something to be desired, but they were awesome with the girls. The guy who was there that morning was talking to us and he’s a huge Disney fan. He told us that his family had just moved down to the Orlando area a few months prior because they wanted to be close to the parks and have APs and love to just go after the kids get out of school some evenings. So even though they weren’t CMs, they were passionate about it, dedicated to the product and gave that same great Disney like service.
They give you an opportunity to buy a mermaid tail at a $20 discount if you buy it the morning of your lesson. However, the discounted price is still $115. That was a bit more than we planned to spend. They didn’t push the extra purchase in a hard sell way, but they did talk openly about it in front of the kids which meant that B was upset that we didn’t want to buy her a tail that morning. I don’t believe anybody purchased one the morning we were there. We offered to buy her a T-shirt for $20, but she was being stubborn and it was going to be the tail or nothing... so she got nothing.
Another thing of note, they didn’t limit us to how many people were allowed into the pool area to observe. We had our whole family there sitting on loungers watching. I’m trying to share whatever information I can think of but if you have questions about it, feel free to ask!
So in no real significant order, here are some pictures of B enjoying her mermaid school swimming lesson.
After B got to enjoy mermaid school, we decided to take advantage of being allowed into the pool area before rope drop and beat the crowd into the water at 9 am. We knew it would be a late start at any parks after her lesson so we didn’t have anything until a noon FP and then lunch at EPCOT.
We spent an hour or so just enjoying the water while it wasn’t very crowded at all. It made for a very nice, relaxing morning. We headed in and got changed and told Mom and Dad we’d pick them up at about 11:30 to drive to EPCOT instead of messing with the bus.
Now for a life update...
I’m hoping to try to stay somewhat caught up around here. But between work and harvest on the farm this is a busy time of year. On top of that we’ve had some issues arise with R’s health.
Not to get too far in the weeds with details, but we’ve seen some of the symptoms pop up that we’ve had to watch for with his shunt and diaphragm repair. There's been an ER visit and a couple of different CT’s to try to find out what is going on with him. Turns out he has a hole in the patch on his diaphragm and his colon is looped up through it and under his left lung. It’s not considered an emergency yet, but he’s getting fast tracked to a surgery in 2 weeks, at which they will essentially reverse the repairs made to his diaphragm when he was a week old and put in a whole new patch rather than try to patch the patch or re-attach it as they did a couple of years ago. This is going to be a major surgery with at least a weeklong hospital stay so if you could add him to your prayers, please do.