this summer i went swimming...

We took K&L to the park on Saturday because it was sunny and it was Saturday and the wading pool was filled. (It's revealing that the city has a wading-pool-hotline you can call to find out whether or not the parks are filling wading pools each day. If nothing else, it's reflective of the fact that many of our summer days don't crack 65, and that's the cutoff for putting water into the pools.)

The girls loved it, and L continued to demonstrate that she's likely to be our swimmer. K likes being in the water, but she's more cautious and doesn't like her face/ears in the water. L doesn't seem to mind having her ears below the water, and is willing to deal with water in her face.

They both ran and splashed and L took several tumbles face-first into the water without seeming to care much. I heard women across the pool gasp when she went down the first time, but she picked herself up, face streaming water, and laughed in my direction and took off again.

Her normal run is something between a drunken sailor's lurching and a three-legged dog's sideways motion, so put her in the water and things get "interesting" pretty quickly. But she enjoys herself so much that we can't help but enjoy it with her.

M's got plans to get them both into lessons this fall. Both M and I spent a lot of time in the water as kids, and it's something we want for the girls, both for pleasure, and for safety. I'd love to be able to swim with the girls, to take them into the water in Hawaii and to play in pools around here. Some of my favorite kid memories have to do with water: swimming at the Maui Country Club (we weren't members, but went with friends who were), playing Marco Polo and doing flips off the diving board (I think I learned to do those at the Elks Club in Waikiki, another club we didn't belong to but our neighbors did), floating in the pool in Puunene as a small kid, swimming underwater the length of the pool, doing cannonballs and dives and sitting on the bottom.... I learned to swim in rough water off Keanae and got comfortable in surf by going to Baldwin Beach regularly. I want the girls to be comfortable too, and to love it if they're inclined but at least to be able to manage if they find themselves swimming unexpectedly.