Swimming with my homies

When I look back on this summer with the boys, I will definitely picture them against the backdrop of a pool. While Sarah was gone and the boys weren't in camp we got into a good rhythm during the day. We would either go to the Zoo or do some errands in the morning, come back for lunch and then watch a little TV in the early afternoon while it was still hot. Then we went to the Y where I would work out while they went to the kid's area.

Then we would ether go out to the pool at the Y or come home and go to our pool for the rest of the afternoon. Each has its virtues so we tended to switch back and forth to avoid excessive repetition. The boys have been playing really nicely at the pool, and actually doing it together sometimes. Connor really loves it when the stand on the edge of the pool inside an inner tube and jump in simultaneously. Sometimes they also jump into the center of the tube when it's in the water. Connor is actually very good at this, except every so often he misses, hits the edge of the tube and bounces off head over heels into the water.

This freaks him out a bit, of course, but he has gotten so brave. He still wears a swim vest but is working hard on swimming with his face under water, which is a big milestone. Just before Sarah got back he started jumping in the water by himself too. He had never done it, but one day we went tot he pool and as soon as I got the vest on him and told him it was OK to get in, he just launched himself. I think he was emboldened during our visit to Nonni and Diddy's. There, too, we went to a pool every afternoon and it had a short (~6 feet) water slide. Jamie, of course, was all over it, going down feet first, head first, on his tummy on his back, you name it. Connor clearly wanted to do it but I didn't know if he could bring himself to actually take the plunge. But after some hemming and hawing and encouragement from Jamie ("Just go Connoooo!") he did and came tumbling out of the slide with really shocking velocity. I caught him and he looked a little freaked and cried and said he didn't want to do it again. But by the time we'd gotten to the side of the pool (about 3 seconds) he was ready to go again and never looked back.

At the Y pool there is a gently sloped shallow area and the boys also loved running into this and then splashing headfirst and swimming to me. We did this for hours and hours. It developed a kind of ritual aspect for Connor. It started when he would stand outside the pool and ask me to count for him to go. I did this with my fingers because it was noisy. So I would count to increasingly high numbers and off he would go. By the time we got to about 25 he got bored waiting so he started saying "count to this" and holding up his fingers in various strange hand shapes. So I would have to replicate that shape exactly or else he would not go and soon become angry with me. I think it must have looked a little like I was holding up gang signs to him. Hey, Connor is street. And he speaks French.