To be grossed out by this?

[swimmingwithbaby]

I have a tendency to be over anxious around germs and contamination/ illness, so I need some perspective here.

When I take my 1 year old swimming (private classes that we pay for each month), one of the activities the instructor has us doing is to put some water in our mouths and "spurt" it out so that baby can see you doing it. The theory is that they will mimic you and therefore it's supposed to teach them to spit water back out and not swallow it if they get it in their mouths.

Anyway... I feel really grossed out by this. There's 4-5 other parents and babies in the class at the same time and the pool isn't huge, and we are standing in relatively close proximity to each other when this is happening. All I can think is, am I putting water into my mouth that's now mixed with other parents' saliva?

Honestly it really makes me feel unwell and I'm at the point of saying to the instructor can I sit this one out please?

But I don't want to look odd by saying that. And my baby has also started to sort of mimic me and blow raspberries back at me when she watches me doing it, which suggests she's learning from it, so if it's beneficial I don't want to just stop doing it.

Anyway... am I anxiously overthinking how gross this is? Or is it genuinely gross? 😩

The pool water is chlorinated and entirely safe.

I've done this my entire life since my late teens and I'm late 30s now. My optician advises it's fine so long as I change them straight after the pool. I wouldn't be able to see otherwise and obviously can't wear glasses in the pool.

This is why I hate using swimming pools. You might as well drink someone's bath water, and not just the cleanest people's bath water.

It's a big problem for me but I can't overcome my disgust at the thought of swimming pool water. A PP asked 'don't you ever get the water in your mouth?' and my answer is - no, never. Not since childhood and learning to swim. I look ridiculous as I keep my head clear of the water, doing an awkward breaststroke and probably harming my back with my bad posture, but it's that or nothing!

Telling me that it's chlorinated doesn't help one bit. Lovely, toxic, bleachy chlorine - great. Apparently, when you smell the bleachy smell, it's not actually the chlorine itself but the chlorine reacting with urine etc. Lovely.

Yet I do like swimming...

Chlorine in the water will kill the nasties but YANBU. I've worked with swimming pools. I wouldn't be absolutely dying to spit out pool water but the lesson to baby supercedes the fear.

@pimlicoanna

but she's not putting it in her mouth. He is

Read it again.

That's the point of the exercise. The point of the tread is OP isn't comfortable doing so.

Very gross

The whole point of the exercise is clearly to prevent the kids from developing the exact hang ups the OP has about submerging her head/face.

It's not gross, it's the basis of learning to swim effectively and being confident in the water.

I (as everyone else presumably did) took swimming lessons at school and was never asked to fill my mouth with pool water and spit it out as part of training. That’s vile.

The volume of a small swimming pool, say 10m x 10m x 1m is 100cu.m, or 100,000 litres. The volume of a wee is, say, a cupful, so let’s say 250 millilitres (0.25 litres)
If, worst case, 100 people do a massive 0.5 litre wee then the concentration of wee in the pool will be 0.05%, or to put it another way, if you drink 1litre of pool water it’ll have about 0.5 millilitres (= one tenth of a teaspoon) of wee in it, realistically much less. Think about it. If you’re worried about this don’t look up the allowable amounts of blood, feces, skin cells, etc. allowed in milk.

I agree it's gross if you think too much about it (!) but necessary for someone who wants to swim properly. OP that doesn't mean you have to do it yourself when swimming with your little DC now, but as soon as they're old enough to do lessons with an instructor, sign them up and give yourself a break!

This!! You're basically all sharing a big bath, the time for being precious has passed!!

Also I believe studies have found most of the dead skin, pubes hair, snot, spit, poo crumbs float in the top inch or two of pool water so if you are going to do it go a bit deeper to get your mouthful of water.

Can't they know bubbles instead. That's yuck.

I started this thread thinking YABU but not I can’t get the terms ‘basting genitals’ and genital water out of my head. And as for brown sweetcorn…. 🤮

It's far more dodgy getting water in contact lenses anyway TBF. I'm terrible for wearing my lenses in the pool and the shower but it's not recommended to do either as it can cause infection.

I'm so glad someone else said this as I was reading the thread thinking why is no one addressing that this is such a strange thing to do in swimming lessons!

OP- neither I nor my two DCs (both under 4) have ever been asked to put pool water in our mouths 🤢 absolutely vile! My nearly 4 year old can put his head in the water, knows not to breathe in or drink it, and can swim independently with floats on and none of that is due to me spitting out water.

I'd suggest sitting it out and blowing bubbles in the water instead, or if that makes you feel icky then our swim school has little toys that you have to blow across the pool which doesn't require any face in the water at all.

Perhaps shop around for a different swim school if this one's methods aren't your thing. They aren't all the same.

LOL@ absolutely vile 🤣

They include this activity at my baby’s swim class and I just don’t do it !

That's gross. 🤮 I definitely wouldn't do it. I've had 2 children go through swimming lessons and I never spat water at them ever, and they're excellent swimmers now so it's going to make naff all difference.

In three years of baby/toddler swimming lessons I’ve never yet had to submerge my head or seen a teacher submerge theirs, nor had to put any water in my mouth, and I don’t intend to ever do so. We do blow raspberries but that’s it. None of the kids’ swimming has suffered for it.

Just to say I did baby swimming with both of mine from the age of 3ms lasting a lot of years and I never did the weird spitting out thing. There was a lot of blowing bubbles so you are going to have to get your face wet but the whole spitting thing feels like something you can miss without guilt.

Also… sometimes you do just have to do your own thing and not go with what the instructor has on the page. Took me a number of years to get there but if you/your baby hate an element it’s not a disaster to skip it. Both of mine had periods of doing absolute bugger all in lessons before suddenly loving it. My second hated submersions for about a year so we just didn’t do them. At 3 her favourite thing is diving down to pick up sticks and swimming underwater.

I was thinking of going swimming tomorrow, not anymore 😂

Just don't think about it, the chlorine kills everything off anyways, and your baby is learning from it. If you swim at other times you swallow some water for sure.

Bring a bottle of water and just spit that out instead.