Say Goodbye to Pool Season

This was the "pool summer" in which all the kids got the courage to jump off the diving board over and over again until it wasn't scary. It was the summer that we stayed until closing time at our neighborhood pool night after night. A swam the whole length of the pool several times and E learned to do forward and reverse somersaults in the water. Half a dozen times J joined the water basketball game going on in the pool with boys he had never met--he loved doing that. And J would beg me to play "diving catch" (in which we threw a ball the length of the pool to each other over and over) every time the pool was empty-ish. Dan convinced A to let him flip her backwards in the water and she got pretty good at it. 

 There was a time when I thought we couldn't afford a pool membership and now I feel like we can't afford to pass on it. For two years we've saved Christmas cash to pay for this extra luxury. Now that the kids are fairly water safe I can't imagine a summer without free swimming and family nights at the pool. It is the activity that provides them with exercise and relief from the heat and mosquitoes while giving them a chance for their bodies to produce all that good vitamin D while they're in the sun. 

 In short, I don't know what we're going to do without the pool. Monday was the last day of our neighborhood pool's swim season, so we stayed until it was getting dark. It was our last official day of summer. It's a good thing we love autumn in this house or I'd be tempted to mourn a little. Besides I'm sure we can find someway to swim in the next nine months until it's pool season again.