F-I-N-A-L-L-Y

I like the line in the movie Father of the Bride when the daughter comes home from her European Study Abroad program and her fiancé, whom she met while studying, is coming over to meet the parents.  The young twenty-ish daughter is bounding out the door for a date with her fiancé when her father says, "You might want a coat, it is cold outside."  To which the daughter shrugs and says that she'll be fine.  The fiancé chimes in, "You might want a coat, it is cold outside."  The daughter in a surprised tone, as if she'd never heard the advice before, says, "Oh, okay" and grabs her coat. 

Sprinkled throughout my adult life my mom has been encouraging me with little sayings about getting in the water and learning how to swim. As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, with a surprised reaction from many, my parents enrolled me in swim lessons under my duress as a child and as a result, I never truly have felt confident nor grasped the necessary level of swim proficiency. 

My good friend has been to Hawaii twice this year with her family; a perk that comes through her husband's employer.  Both sets of travel pictures showed an amazing water adventure with dolphins, sea turtles, fish, surf boards, and relaxing swim fun with her family.  I made the mistake of commenting to her about my lack of swim skills and thought nothing of my confession. 

Two weeks later she wrote a lengthy email to me about how much my comment about my lack of swim skills was bothering her.  By the end of the email, she was the fiancé in the Father of the Bride movie and I was listening to her. She challenged me to call our local community pool and get registered for private swim lessons. 

Given a timeline, the push I needed, I called with ten hours to spare and got my date, time, and swim instructor on my calendar. Within the month of April, I will have had my first swim lesson and will be in the water swimming for the first time in thirty years.  

In time if I cross the swimming pool with out panic, cross a lake with out drowning, swim in the safe zone of an ocean, and enjoy it ... then I will have her to thank for the final push, the blog friends who recently added their encouragement the last time I blogged about this to make it jump to the forefront in my mind, and ... my mom who started the nudge way-back-when. 

I might just treat our family to a Hawaiian vacation!