So far we're having a great time, but our vacation has been nothing if not loud. An oft-whiny four-year-old combined with an even more often and more screamy two-year old PLUS a 15-month old who caught his cousin's cold (of course he did! we're on vacation!) equals very little quiet time. Add to that a grandma with both a keen garage sale sense and a high tolerance for noisy toys and we're basically vacationing in a cacophony of chaos.
My two child free siblings keep disappearing downstairs. I wonder why?
And then there's the swimming...
I'm just going to come right out and say this, but I basically hate swimming. When Alex was a newborn I read a story about some parents who took their two-year-old kid on a house boating trip and while they turned around to unload the car each thought the other one was watching the child and he slipped silently into the water and drowned. It took them two hours to find his body. So in spite of being a relatively decent swimmer myself and honestly not EVER remembering a time when I feared the water or couldn't swim, one of my most pressing and psychotic parental fears is DROWNING. It's even worse than my postpartum fear of accidentally leaving Genoa in the hot car (remember that? good times!).
So when I'm in the pool with my kids, I'm basically a mess. I might look all happy and fine on the outside in my giant skirted bathing, but I can't breathe and inside, I'm Freaking Out. And then there's the wet hair and the chlorine and the not being able to see because I took my glasses off and the splashing and the dry skin and yeah, I'm obviously no fan of swimming.
Naturally, Alex fears the water almost as much as I fear his drowning in it. Last year he fell under for approximately two seconds and it scared him and I overreacted and somehow that experience has been growing exponentially in his mind. It was literally NOTHING, almost a non-event, but it has turned itself into a Fear with a capital F. Even after four whole months of twice-weekly swimming lessons, he basically spends the entire time we're at the pool sitting on the top step wearing a life jacket and refusing all of our requests to hold him in the water.
Yet he BEGS ME ALL DAY LONG to go swimming. It's his favorite activity and it honestly breaks my heart a little that he won't actively participate in something he loves so much. The child would take a two-hour bath in our big tub every day if I let him, but he won't step into my parent's pool, where the non-event happened, not even up to his knees.
Yesterday I got him to let me hold him in the middle of the spa for about ten minutes. I told him it was time to get out of the pool (you know, off the top step) and he didn't want to go, so I said, "Fine. If you let me hold you in the water, we can stay." So we did and he was fine. And now you know my strategy for getting him over this fear. Step by step I'm going to threaten that pool time is over.
Genoa, on the other hand, could not be more opposite of her brother. She wants you to pull her around the pool, wearing a floaty or not, while she blows bubbles in the water and kicks her feet. Yesterday she kept jumping across the spa between my sister and me, not paying a lick of attention to whether or not we were there to catch her when she jumped (we always were, obviously, but still!). She put her face in the water (up to her nose) and got her hair wet and let us hold her so she could float on her back. She has absolutely NO fear whatsoever and I love it.
So in spite of my fear and my obvious distaste for the activity, I suck it up and take my kids swimming because they love it and I love them.