The story goes, I was two years old and my dad put me in a life jacket and tossed into the middle of the pool and told me to swim to the edge. They say that my mother stood to the side panicked, but my dad was full of confidence that I was up to the task. To this day I still get up early in the morning to go swimming when I can. There’s something exhausting and refreshing about being in the pool. Today, I bought Katja a life jacket and took her to the pool for the first time in Eugene. We’ve been to a pool once before and shop housing when she was about 18 months old. Now that she is 21 months old, she loves going down the waterslide, she kicks her legs when I hold her trying to teach her how to swim, and she loves jumping off the edge into the water!