Pool Time!

It's hard to believe that Rachel was ever hesitant in the water. I never get to see her in swim lessons, but apparently a switch has gone off in her brain because she begged us to take her to Upton Hills Saturday and I could barely get her out of the water! Drew had a bunch of errands to run, as well as get his hair cut, so Rachel and I hung out at the pool from 1 p.m. to around 5:30 before Drew came back. She insisted I stay in the pool the entire time, even though I was scared for my foot (I'm in a boot until the end of this week) and the pool was really crowded.

She now does belly flops, an approximation of a cannonball, and swims back and forth underneath the rope. I taught her how to breathe out of her nose instead of in while underwater and she said it really made a difference. We played multiple rounds of Marco Polo, made up some games (how long we could clutch our knees to our chests underwater before our legs collapsed; Three Questions about what color, animal, etc. that the other one was thinking about).

At one point I got out of the water to rest. Rachel pouted and asked to call Daddy. "I feel like you don't want to spend time with me," she said plaintively, and I reminded her that I had raced back the night before just so I could have dinner with her, and that I'd spent most of the day in the pool with her and that I LOVED spending time with her (although by that time, I was really wanting to just chill out and read the paper). We went back in (it was about the fourth time by then), and then she asked to get out and rest for a while -- and then Drew showed up. He immediately went in with her, and I leaned my head back on a lounge chair, closed my eyes and took a mini-nap. At that point it started to rain, so we gathered up our things, went back to the house and changed for dinner.

When we went out to a Thai place near our house that Drew wanted to try, the skies really opened up and it POURED. Hard, driving rain that I missed all those years living in Oregon. Luckily it stopped just long enough for us to get ice cream at Toby's, our local ice cream parlor -- and then when we got home, it began storming again, enough to light up the sky so bright that from the study it looked like someone had turned on a light switch outside. Rachel was totally unfazed, thank goodness.