All Wet

What a wonderful weekend for getting into the water!

On Saturday evening we took the whole family to the public pool. It's lovely to be able to go one-on-one with the girls as they get more adventuresome. Rose has been taking swimming lessons during summer day-camp, and can now tread water a little bit and do a splashy crawl for a few yards. She's also stretching out taller and taller, to the point where she can stand up easily in the water at the base of the lovely long waterslides. I've been trying to persuade her to go down the waterslide for the past couple of years -- but they won't let you wear your goggles, and they won't let you go down tandem, and these have always been her excuse. Finally on Saturday I convinced her to go down one slide while I went down the other. Guess what she did over and over again, all on her own, for the rest of the evening, and was terribly disappointed to quit when it was time to go?!

Joy, meanwhile, was making new discoveries too. She was experimenting with going underwater (all in the 2-3 foot zone of the pool, not to worry!) She was teaching herself to hold her breath, either popping right back up or submarining forward underwater for a bit. No coughing and choking at all. It was wonderful to see.

Since Rose was so busy with the waterslide, I didn't get any two-girls-jumping-in photos like we did last year. Joy didn't mind the lack of company, though. She jumped quite happily on her own. And the new twist this time was that she didn't always really need someone to catch her! She needed someone to jump towards, but there were several jumps where she went in and under and then stood up all on her own, without JoyDad having to touch her at all.


On Sunday we stayed in the back yard for our pool play, with a new larger inflatable pool and a big blue bucket. Joy loves the bucket in particular. This move I call "the ostrich":


She was probably drinking the water. Oh did she drink the water, both at the public pool and at home. I don't know how she could hold that much -- her subsequent diapers certainly couldn't....

Rose invented a new game to distract her sister from consuming the water (perhaps we could call it a non-drinking game?) This one involved big buckets of dump and splash! I hasten to add that Joy doesn't mind being deluged. It makes hairwashing in the tub much easier than it otherwise would be.


At least Rose has a sense of fair play and equal opportunity deluge:


I can't believe that it's August already.