Before I became a mom, I didn’t realize how hard it is to keep kids from drinking pool water. Apparently this is one of those universal parenting challenges no one thinks to tell you about in advance.
Drinking in general is a challenging area. Babies have a lot to learn so you can’t really blame them. What can you drink? What can you not drink? Why does liquid come out of a bottle nipple but not a pacifier nipple? Why does milk come out of a nipple in general but not a knuckle or a knee?
My baby is very confused about all this. I breastfeed, which works fine for her (except when she tries to drink from my knee). But she refused to take a bottle at all for several months, making it pretty near impossible for me to get any kind of a break long enough to leave the house without her.
I went on a campaign trying to find any other way to get her to ingest milk. Different bottles, faster flow bottle nipples, skinny bottles she could hold by herself… to no avail. We even tried just having her drink from a little shot glass. She was interested in chewing on the rim of the glass more than lapping up the milk, so this was about as efficient a system as Cookie Monster eating a cookie.
Then I read that babies can learn to drink from a straw, so I grabbed a tiny silicone straw and put it into her shot glass. And voila! We were off to the races. She would down that milk one shot at a time faster than I could keep filling the cup. She even started to prefer the shot glass to breastfeeding because it was faster. (What kind of monster are we raising?)
A week or two later, she discovered that you can also blow bubbles through a straw! Now that’s all she wants to do. She even talks into the straw so it’s not only messy, but loud. Never mind the milk, Mom. I’m just singing my little song here! Bbbbbbbbb!
I feel like such a rookie mom, always one step behind. But I don’t give up easily, so I rigged a new solution: a bigger cup with a little lid that fits on it and a longer straw. This would catch most of the bubbles before they sprayed all over the kitchen floor.
Alas, the longer straw didn’t seem to work. (Maybe it’s hard to generate that much suction with a little baby mouth.) Back to the shot glass.
In the midst of this, I had a revelation. Maybe I could get her to blow bubbles in the pool this way, using a long straw! I’ve been trying to teach her some basic swimming skills, including breathing out under the water. I heard if you model this enough, babies eventually catch on (and I’m using other techniques too).
So I grabbed a nice long straw and we headed to the pool. We climbed into the water and I gave her a few demonstrations of bubble blowing at its finest. Look, baby! Bbbbbb!
She reached for the straw, immediately did a perfect suck and gulped down a bunch of pool water.
I had to look around to see if any other parents were laughing. I mean, really. There’s trying not to let your kid drink the water, and then there’s straight up handing them a straw.
I decided to go back to focusing on the other swimming techniques. So today she and I were at the pool working on getting comfortable floating on her back. I held her in the water as I made conversation with an older mom. This lady is from Belarus, and she was chattering away to me about how her daughter ended up in the States and why it’s terrible to be a music teacher here.
(She was speaking Russian to me, but it’s still funny if you imagine this with an appropriate accent.) “They put children in music lessons who have no musical ear at all. They can’t learn a simple tune in a month. It would be easier to teach a bear to play piano…” Then she paused and pointed down at my baby. “She’s drinking the water.”
Ah, so she was. She had turned her head to the side and was contentedly lapping up the pool water like a little bear. Doesn’t even need a straw. Maybe we should forget swimming and just get her some piano lessons.
Photo by Carly Jayne on Unsplash