Sharks and Fish and Such

Just a little memory to tuck away...

At 2:30 p.m. today, we were at a birthday party in the park, making tie-dye t-shirts and eating ice cream cake. It was WARM...humid and sticky warm. The way it should be on a Mayday. The pool opened today, and I spent a fair amount of time talking to some of the other neighborhood parents, tallying up the number of Sophie's friends who will be on the swim team this summer, listening to the laughter at the nearby pool and wishing we'd brought suits.

Tomorrow is the trial: the day that 5 and 6-year-old's have to prove that they can swim across the length of the pool, unaided. I wasn't sure, earlier today, if Sophie could do it. I promised her that we would come to the pool after J's nap, to give it a try. (Why, oh why, did it not occur to me then that I have NEVER witnessed her swimming the length of the pool?)

So fast forward to 5:30 p.m., when we all wake up from a lovely nap. That's another memory I will document, because it doesn't happen all that often, but today, on May 1st, all of the Websters napped. Lovely. So we hem and haw about whether or not we should all go to the pool or not, and we finally split into two teams: the dinner gatherers and the swim-team-test pre-testers. I am on Team 2, so I don my suit. As soon as we opened up the front door, I realized that we had been snookered by the Texas weather. The temp had dropped at least 10 degrees, maybe 15, and a cool wind was blowing.

But a promise is a promise. Sophie and I braved the wind and drove down to the pool, where all the lifeguards had thrown on sweatshirts, and were busily stacking the pool furniture. "Are you closed?" I asked. "No," one of them responded, "it's just really, really cold." And then he looked at me with that what-kind-of-craptastic-parent-are-you look on his face. Oh, I'm a wily one, kid.

So we threw off our cover-ups, Sophie and I. And I triple, quadruple checked if she really wanted to go through with this. She did. I made her step into the water first, because, if she chickened out, I was NOT going in. She did not chicken out. She squealed when the water hit her belly button, but she did not chicken out. So I jumped in with her, because that is what a mom who makes a promise sometimes has to do.

And she sank. I mean, she TOTALLY sank. She spittered and spattered and swam vertically and clung onto my neck and shivered and giggled and SANK. She will not be trying out tomorrow. She will not be on the Sharks swim team this year. But we tried, baby. And then we raced home for hot showers and some pad thai take-out that the boys procured.


In other news: Jameson killed our fish. And Frank. (I mean, Frank helped kill the fish.) Only a month after putting my class pet in mortal danger by dumping in a whole jar of food (Snooki was saved, thanks be to God), and only two days after dumping in a whole jar of food into Laney's fish's tank, thus revealing to the Stephenses that George had been dead for a couple of days (there was some talk of decomposition levels, but it's possible he killed George, too), Jameson dumped a whole jar of food (what kind of IDIOTS are we, that we still had a jar of fish food within reach?) into Lillian's tank. We have had Lillian a long, long time, but Frank has never had to clean her tank. He dumped out the water and put Lillian into nice, fresh, shockingly-cold water (not unlike the pool today). And Lillian freaked out and died. Sophie handled it well.

We will get another fish. We will become a shark another day. Life goes on.