ISR Refresh Course: Sadie’s Second Year of Lessons

Sadie finished up her ISR refresh course last week and I thought I’d share a little bit about it for those of you with kiddos who may be interested in this topic. 🙂 Most of you know that we are swim safety fanatics around here and I believe in ISR with every fiber of my being, so any opportunity to share little bits and pieces about this program make me excited!

We did a bunch of swimming in Grand Cayman in March, which gave me an idea of how each of our girls did with retaining what they learned from their first ISR course last summer. Though Hadley couldn’t float as well as she could last summer, she still did really well with swimming independently in general, so we decided that she didn’t need an ISR refresh course. Sadie, on the other hand, needed the refresher.

So as soon as we got home from our trip, I got in touch with our instructor and hoped we could have ISR complete by the time our neighborhood pool opens up Memorial Day weekend.

We started mid April, and it took Sadie 16 lessons (just over three weeks) to graduate. It’s so neat how she picked it up SO fast this time around, as well as a bunch of other kiddos who were also there to do refreshers. We went every day after preschool pickup, which was perfect because then the girls would go home and snooze (Sadie would knock out quickly because she was always tired after school + swim). Each lesson is 10 minutes long, which is plenty long enough considering it’s a solid 10 minutes of them swimming back and forth to walls, the instructor, etc.

Sadie fussed the first couple of days, but she stopped fussing entirely within a few days and practically jumped into the instructor’s arms each lesson. We love our Mrs. Kim so, so very much! She is like family to us.

By the end of the course, Sadie could float for a long while, kick her legs super hard, and swim as well as any brand new three year old probably could. ISR is a miracle program! She opens her eyes fully under water and does great with looking for a wall or a person to swim to and hold on to.

I told the girls at the beginning of ISR that I would take them both to Target to pick out their own swim floats once Sadie graduated and if Hadley could swim the length of a pool (still stopping on the side of the pool for breaks of course). They both got check marks and were thrilled to pick out floats this past weekend. They also picked out kick boards!

Though I would never trust Sadie to swim independently without an adult at arm’s length, I am very impressed with how she improved in just a few short weeks and am really excited for the fun we will have at the pool this summer.

When Hadley had her accident in 2016, she was 2 years 10 months old. Sadie turned three during her refresher course. During so many of Sadie’s lessons, I thought about how if Hadley had the knowledge then that Sadie does now, she would have never drowned. This thought brings about a strange, sometimes unsettling combination of guilt coupled with pride: guilt for what happened to Hadley and pride for how well they can both now swim. ISR has changed everything for us!

I never tire of hearing new families sign up for ISR. I always tell families that yes, it’s expensive (about $90 per kid per week) and yes, it’s time consuming (every single weekday for 10 minutes per lesson for 4-6 weeks for new students), but I’ve never met a family who regretted doing it. To see your little one accomplish the things they do is really just miraculous!

More: The first two weeks of ISR last summer (how it was going for the girls), the conclusion of ISR last summer, and sharing our ISR experience on our local news