When Alastair is taking care of the girls while I'm at work, a popular indoor activity -- which I think a reader may have actually suggested -- is the pool party. It's sort of like a bath -- OK, it is a bath -- but the girls wear their bathing suits, Alastair puts on Led Zeppelin or some other pool-party-appropriate music, and dumps more bath toys and tupperware containers than usual into the tub. There is bubble-blowing, too. And lots of shouting "pool party!" Needless to say, the girls love it. (Amazing how much more fun something is when you call it a party, isn't it? I think tonight A and I are going to have an applying to refinance our mortgage party. Woo hoo!)
So, yesterday, E & C were very excited to find out that we were taking them to their first *real* pool party. (AKA tot swim class.) They were definitely taken aback when we first got to the pool. An indoor pool, particularly when filled with children of various shapes and sizes, is an intense sight for the uninitiated. The smell of chlorine, the echoey noise, the damp floor -- all quite foreign and a little bit intimidating. (And I may be projecting a bit here; I was always a tad freaked by the pool at my local YMCA as a kid.) But once Elsa saw the kids in the class before ours going down little plastic slides into the water, she was sold. I had to hold her back as she attempted to make a break for the stairs into the pool. Clio, meanwhile, not surprisingly, was more hesitant.
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