Teaching A Toddler To Swim

• “Jump to Dada!”
• “No running by the pool.”
• “Kick, kick, kick!”
• “Stay away from the deep end.”
• “You can do it!”
• “Be careful!”

Lake George 2012

All things you say and shout to a toddler at the pool.  Max, my two-year-old, loves going to his grandparent’s house to play in their yard and swim in the pool.  Pool season is back and he is a few months older…and a few months more adventurous.  We’ve been going to the YMCA all winter where they have an indoor pool so he is very familiar with water but it clearly scares him as well.  He loves being in it when it is very shallow but once it is waist-high he’s had his fun and heads for shallow waters.  This is a good thing for safety but counterproductive to teaching him to swim.  How do you teach a toddler to have a healthy fear of water at a young age while teaching him to swim?

Dodge’s 1st Swim

Memorial Day weekend we took the boys swimming and Dodge, our three-month-old, took a dip for the first time and loved it.  Max was a weirdo and only wanted to sit on the stairs with his feet in…which is fine because I don’t want to drag him into the water and make him afraid of it.  He gradually worked up to getting in and with the assistance of a life-vest felt comfortable riding piggyback on me as I paddled around.  Then I continued teaching him how he has to kick his feet to swim and move his arms.  When he started doing it while I was holding him was when I gave him some small distances to swim.  He swam from me to the stairs…about a foot which is really just jumping and coasting.  We did this a number of times till he knew what to expect and then, when he coasted to me, I took step back and there he was floating.  He panicked for a moment and dog-paddled for his life into my arms.  We all cheered and he knew he had done something cool.  So we did this a few more times till he jumped off the stairs and I didn’t catch him at all.  He was just floating next to me, dog-paddling, focused (not scared), and he turned a little and swam right to me!  It was awesome!  My son swam.

© Allison Gates

Last weekend we were back at the pool with some friends who have a four-year-old girl who Max is in awe of.  Whenever they play together he learns something new because he wants to be just like her.  She strided into the pool without any flotation device and swam to her dad.  Max thought this was amazing.  While she still needed help and the deep end was off-limits, she was fully capable of maneuvering herself around the pool.  So what did Max do?  What any boy would do around an older girl he likes…he started showing off.  He likes to jump in the pool from the side where I catch him.  I thought this would be an interesting moment to see what would happen if I didn’t catch him.

KERPLUNK!

© Allison Gates

Max cannon-balled into the pool, sank to the bottom of the shallow end, bobbed to the surface kicking his feet, and reached out for me.  I grabbed him and looked into his eyes as he cleared the water away to see if I’d spooked him or encouraged fun.  ”Again!!!”  He shouted at the top of his lungs.  Ah…fun.  We repeated this numerous times till all the adults were tired and ready to be dry.  Everyone got out of the pool except for me, Max, and his “girlfriend.”  Then it happened.  He let go of me.  He voluntarily let go of me and was floating in the water next to me kicking his feet and moving his arms the way I taught him.  He swam over to his friend with a HUGE smile on his face and showed no sign of coming back to Dada’s arms.  Max was on his own in the pool.  He swam to the deep end and back three times without ever stopping.  He played.  He figured out how to turn.  He splashed with his friend as he swam.  He swam.  He swam!  HE SWAM!

© Allison Gates

In the end I had to drag him from the pool.  He’s a fish.  I don’t have any pictures because I was too busy swimming alongside him, cheering him on, and soaking up the moment.  It was one of my proudest days as a papa and there was nothing that was going to take me away from experiencing that moment with my son.  That night Max and I talked endlessly about it at bedtime.  I said, “Did you have fun swimming with Dada?”  Max honestly replied, “No, I swam all by myself.”  I knew what he meant and he was right…he swam all by his self…like a big boy.  My big boy.  So the moral to the story I guess is you teach kids the skills they need and then patiently wait for them to use them when they are ready.  I’ve been teaching Max to swim for over a year and he did it on Saturday.  It was when he was ready.  Patience.  <sigh>  There seems to be a lot of rewards for this “patience” thing…I need to learn to use it more often.  Also, kids learn more from other kids so get them together as often as possible.  Who knows what baby Dodge will learn from his big brother Max as they get older.

“Dodge Shark”…the next swimming Gates.

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A Friday Morning Poem

Alarms are buzzing, Dodge is crying,

Max is hungry, Kate is sighing.

Drag my body out of bead,

Wake up feet…are you dead?

Serenity comes in a coffee cup,

Delivered in attempt to wake me up.

Shower while Kate feeds the boys,

Stepping on Max’s bath-time toys.

Left sock, right sock, underwear,

Deodorant, toothbrush, styled hair.

Take the pills the pharmacist sold,

Because inevitably I’m getting old.

Wallet found, Where are my keys?

Max has hidden them in the trees.

Or are they right here in my hand?

Am I awake yet, I don’t understand.

Forehead kiss and on the cheek,

Max and I leave to close the week.

Off to school where there is a sign,

“BEWARE! Your child has been exposed to pink eye.“

Pause…consider…Meh, he’ll be fine,

Drop him off and check the time.

Late for work and feeling woozy,

What was in that breakfast smoothie?

Watch my speed down Rock Road,

Perfect driving record must not go.

Office, meeting, phone call, desk,

Slide into the chair that loves me best.

Glasses donned and deadlines due,

Time to do whatever it is I do.

And so I bid the week adieu,

Its Friday!  The weekend will be here very soon!

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Jobs, Careers, And Passions

Leaving Upstate NY

Much of So Long Freedom has tracked my journey into fatherhood and the inevitable transformation into responsibility.  However, becoming a parent was not the only part of the 180 degree turnaround my wife and I embarked on exactly three years ago…one of those changes was giving up the world of production for the world of marketing.  Three years and two days ago my wife Kate and I rolled into town with a car full of stuff, a bed strapped to the roof of our car, and an overweight cat named Luna…the only life-form we were responsible for outside of our own well being.  We snagged a quick shower, unloaded the bed from the roof, and drove straight to Koch Arena for the Gregg Marshall Auction; an event to raise money for the Wichita State University Basketball team.  It was our first act as Wichitans…to go to an auction and bid on items to help our team.  Back then it was my team.  Kate just supported me in my passions.

In Atlanta for the Final Four

Flash forward three years and is “our team.”  Mine, Kate’s, and my two boys Max and Dodge.  This year it was slightly different as I sat at one of the head tables with my family and friends as a supporter.  The family restaurant I have worked to become managing partner of, Heroes, had just pulled off our largest catering gig to date and I was on cloud nine.  In New York and L.A. I had been a high profile commercial director/producer…a job with tons of sex appeal and ever changing currents.  However, sensing the economic problems in America I realized in 2007 I needed a plan to be more self sufficient than freelance producing commercials   I launched my own production company, began taking on viral marketing consulting jobs, took on a few large clients, and by 2009 our time was being 95% consumed by one phenomenal client.  In 2010…three years ago Saturday…I moved to Wichita, KS and traded in my title of “Creative Director and Producer” for “Director of Marketing.”  It was a big change.

Ice Breakers Sours launch in Cancun, Mexico

There is a saying I have always told my students, kids I mentor, or people asking about how to break in to the production business: “There is a difference between a job and a career, the distance between those is dependent on your having a passion.”  It’s the modern version of what my dad used to preach to me, “Any port in a storm.”  It means exactly what it sounds like.  There are not a lot of great jobs out there but the world is full of the need for people willing to lift the heavy object, flip the burger, and crawl through the crud.  You speak to any successful business person and they will tell you what they had to overcome to get where they are.  Working in film was my passion.  For a magical period of time it was my job, my career, and my passion.  Then life happened and things changed.  Now I have a few jobs, a career, and multiple passions.  Last week my passions collided in a dance.

Sleepy after hours of post production last week

I love my job and that is because of the people I get to work with and the work environment we are lucky enough to have.  Being the managing partner of Heroes, however, is a passion…a labor of love.  Last week I got to direct/produce a commercial for Heroes and it was wonderful.  My past and future, together for 16 hours through the lens of a camera.  I’m always happiest when I get to work with moving images, that the images would be of the place my family has been renovating recently and working on for over 20 years made it extra special.  I had less than two weeks to get something from concept to broadcast which presented an interesting challenge but also gave me the freedom to just get stuff done.  The driving force was that we had just finalized a partnership with a local distributor called Yoder Meats which would be providing us with antibiotic-free, hormone-free, no water added, 100% organic Kansas beef for our famous burgers and pork.  Its exciting.  We’ve been making Sweet Pepper Bacon Burgers for 21 years and they are a signature item so it is with caution that you change something like that.  We worked to develop a secret proprietary blend, a project championed by my father’s amazing palette, and once we had it…we knew we were about to do something great.  The timing was perfect too.  Springtime, the Gregg Marshall Auction (we catered to over 1,000 people), Yoder is becoming nationally recognized, and cost of meat is on the rise nationally – meaning other places are buying low-grade meat.  Not us.  We’re going local and providing a better product at the same cost.  We needed a commercial ASAP and everyone agreed I needed to do it.

The Heroes patio

This past year has been an interesting battle with anxiety and I was slightly nervous about how I would handle the pressure of going back into production mode.  It is much faster paced than my day job at the ole desk.  It is like riding a bike, it all came back to me as if I had just stepped off set with Scorsese the day before.  It is no magnum opus…but it was a heck of an undertaking to go from script to broadcast in less than two weeks while achieving the level of quality we wanted to convey.  The quality of production directly relates to the quality of the food in the viewer’s eye so I refused to have a run-of-the-mill regional commercial.  I put Kate to work on the CreativeRHINO end, hired Intake Studios for production, and tackled the rest myself.  It felt great to be back in the saddle…but as the project ended last week when the thirty second video uploaded to the broadcast site I was happy to be done with it and get back to work.  Sometimes your job is your career and often your job is what affords you the opportunity to pursue your career.  When they intersect it is amazing but often they dance back and forth as they weave around our lives which become more complicated as we grow older.  Max, my two-year-old, wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.  One of the kids I mentor wanted to be a filmmaker when he was 17…now he wants to provide organic food to the community at the age of 21.  I wanted to always see my name in lights and tackle the biggest productions…now I just want to provide quality tools to my stores, turn a profit from Heroes, and get home to see my family in time for supper.  Mostly, I want to go home satisfied at the end of the day and feel like I contributed to something.  Sleep…I want sleep.  I have a two-month-old…I want sleep.  In all seriousness, the point is that it doesn’t matter because I have passions in life and I act on them.  I still jump behind a camera, I work in my wood shop, and I mentor youth in the creative arts.  Jobs and careers?  Who knows what I have and it doesn’t matter because I feel fulfilled.

So…what’s your passion?  Have you acted on it recently?  Is it a sport like golf, a hobby like building things, is it your job, your career, something odd?  I hope you have a passion (or passions) because without passion we’re just slugging along.  Here is one of my passions, and if you find yourself in Wichita, KS I hope you’ll swing by and try one of our Sweet Pepper Bacon Burgers with the secret proprietary blend from Yoder Meats!

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So Long Sleeping

Two months ago I was resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to be sleeping anymore as we were about to have our second child.  Dodge is now 7 weeks old and shockingly enough…he sleeps.  The first few nights were rough but once our little piglet got as much milk as he could handle he started conking out for a few hours during the day and a few hours at night.  Oh…my…GAWD!  This is how all kids should be!  Like when a baby giraffe is born and knows how to walk right away!  Kids should be born and just know how to sleep when mommies and daddies are tired.  So why am I not sleeping?  The two-year-old.

At still-dark-o’clock this morning Max came crying into our room begging for us to wake up and go “back downstairs.”  My first thought was “Why did we teach him how to work the door knob?”  We coerced him into bed with us where he screamed directly into my ear for a few minutes.  I couldn’t quite make out all the words through the tears but it had something to do with him wanting Mommy and not Daddy.  Being the terrible husband that I am (it’s a matching set…bad father/bad husband) I obliged by rolling over and burying my head beneath the pillow like an ostrich.  After an unknown period of not sleeping and getting kicked in the kidney Dodge woke up from all of Max’s whining cries and he started bawling.  This caused Kate to give her attention to Dodge which meant Max wasn’t the sole purpose of her life and erupted into a tantrum.  It was at this moment my alarm clock went off.

Good morning.  It’s another BEAUTIFUL day in the world of parenthood!

copyright David & Kelly Sopp

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Leaving The Past Behind

As Pumbaa from the Lion King says, “Its times like this my buddy Timon here says: you gotta put your behind in the past.”  No, no, no…amateur.  While the theme of Timon and Pumbaa’s catchy tune, Hakuna Matata, eventually leads Simba away from his royal duties as king of the jungle (“Your Majesty, I gravel at your feet!”) it does apply well to anxiety.  You gotta leave the past behind.  Anxiety is like a fungus that feeds on the three fundamentals of how we perceive ourselves in the world: past, present, and future.  When you have an anxiety attack, as I did on Sunday, you are battling your mind for how it perceives the future.  Your anxiety tells your mind that everything is going to go terribly in the future and hope is lost.  This is fantasy as we cannot predict the future, so the steps to overcoming an anxiety attack are…

STEP 1

Accept that you do not know what the future holds and the feelings of anxiety you are experiencing are predictions and not factual.  An anxious brain will only fantasize about scenarios where everything goes wrong.  Try to think about good things that you know will happen in the near future and let go of preconceived negative notions on scenarios you have no control over.

STEP 2

Work on how you feel right now.  Right now.  The present.  You can’t predict the future and the past has already passed so just live in the now.  When I am really freaking out it helps me to go to a safe place and do some sensory deprivation and meditate on good possibilities for the future.  I take a long hot shower in complete darkness while sitting down or laying down.  In the summer I submerge myself in water either in Lake George or the pool.

STEP 3

Leave the past behind.  This is hard…for me this is the cyclical part that tries to spiral me back into my anxiety.  It also goes by the name of depression and is what I’d like to talk about today in a little more detail.

Take it away Pumbaa and Timon!

Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase.

Hakuna Matata! Ain’t no passing craze.

It means no worries for the rest of your days!

It’s our problem free, philosophy…

Hakuna Matata!

So there I am Sunday, laying down in the shower with the lights off, and the water so hot it almost burns my skin.  This claustrophobic little spot makes me feel safe…I am a water person so getting into water helps with everything.  My brain is racing with anxious thoughts and I am trying to slow it down.  First I focus on the water and how it feels and ask myself, “How do I feel right now?”  The answer was “Safe.”  So now that I feel comfortable where I am I can work on what I am scared about.  My fears are my own but not unlike yours, mine just get inflated until all I see is disaster ahead of me.  So I visualize a stop sign, go through some CBT techniques, and try to hault the thought process in its tracks.  Then I visualized happy things I knew were going to happen like getting hugged by my two-year-old, the feel of my newborn’s hair on my cheek when I kiss his head, and the touch of my wife’s hand when she holds mine as we walk.  I felt better.  I had stopped making terrible predictions for the future and focused on good things I knew would happen.  I was living in the now.  That is when it happens…the past creeps up to try to fill the void!

My next thought was, “Why am I like this?  Why can’t I go back to how I was a year ago before all these anxiety attacks?”  Guess what the answer to that is?  ”You can’t…things will never be the same.”  POW!!!  Right back into predicting terrible outcomes of the future!  So now I have to redo all the steps and when I get to the “Why am I like this,” question I say, “Hakuna Matata.”  No joke.  I’m singing the Lion King in my head right now.  Worrying about the future is the trigger that starts the process but getting hung up on the past is the trap that keeps the cycle going.

Here’s the rub: I want desperately to go back to how things used to be.  I want to be unafraid to fly on airplanes, drive for miles by myself, and eat anything I want.  I want to feel “normal.”  There is a flight to LA this Thursday with tickets to the Sweet Sixteen waiting for me…and I have turned them down because I know I’m not ready for that much pressure yet and I need to be home with my family and newborn.  Last year I would have been in Omaha for the game against Creighton, in St. Louis for Arch Madness, in Utah for the opening round of the NCAA, in LA for the Sweet Sixteen, and in Atlanta for the Final Four.  No problemo.  This year…I’m afraid to fly and I’m aware that I have a fundamental flaw in the way my brain thinks that needs to be addressed before I can push myself to be adventurous again.  I have to stop living in the past.

I cannot go back in time and since my anxiety has increased my responsibilities have doubled.  I am a father of two now and I am clearly grappling with the desire to be free vs. the need to be responsible.  Call it an early life crisis.  I want the best of both worlds.  I want to be free to do what I want and then come home to my family and be “Dad.”  However, it doesn’t work that way…yet.  You have to work to get that privilege and the work has just begun.  THAT is where my stress comes from.  Contradicting lifestyles: the one I live and the one I used to live.  I cannot fold the old one into the new one, I have to accept the responsibilities of the new one and know that I can’t predict the next phase.  I want to go to LA and see the Shockers play in the Sweet Sixteen…I need to be home with my newborn, my two-year-old, and my exhausted wife…even when she says I can go, because she is the nicest person on the face of the Earth.  I don’t need permission from anyone…I need to make the responsible choice for myself, and that is to stay.  I remember when Kate and I went to the Sweet Sixteen together back in 2006 in DC before we were married and had kids.  Good times.  Hakuna Matata!

I won’t miss my newborn’s first smiles which he has started doing this week.  I won’t miss playing catch with my two-year-old.  I won’t miss the good things in life because I’m focusing on the past or trying to live like I did in the past.  I live in the now.  Go Shocks…I’ll be watching from my couch in Shocker pajamas with a beer in one hand and my baby boy in the other.  Go me.

Max’s 2nd Birthday With The Wichita State Shockers!

My Tiny Wichita State Fan, Dodge.

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