At the pool

Now, I am really new to this whole stay-at-home mom game. My bag of tricks is severely limited, and I plan, soon, to blog about that and beg for advice. But if we were back in Seattle, said bag might be a little more robust simply because of the weather. I mean, is it actually safe to take your 16-month-old out in this gawd-awful 90-degree, 1200% humidity weather? We drive by parks that, on a normal sunny Seattle afternoon, would be crawling with younguns and their stay-at-home supervisors. Here? {Tumbleweeds}. What's a gal to do? I have made my vow that my darling boy will watch no more than 2 hours of TV, as suggested for toddlers by the American Pediatrics Association, and we can only play with his sexy new IKEA train set so much before it gets old, old, old.

Then suddenly, it hit me. Where did **I** go when I was a little kid when it was hot? We lived in equally sweltering Illinois, and we went to the pool. Sure enough, the University of Delaware has this totally awesome public outdoor pool, replete with a securely-fenced-off, 6" baby pool. Though it took me the better part of 20 minutes to convince Isaac that actually getting IN the pool would not result in his permanent disfigurement, when I did, it was awesome.


And here's the best part: we brought along some of our lame-o, uneducated-about-pool-going toys -- a cup and an inflatable beach ball. I inflated the beach ball upon our arrival, threw it in the pool, and it was immediately snatched up by an older kid. We didn't see it the rest of the time we were there. "Why would that be the best part," you ask? Because, unbeknownst to me, there is a tacit, reciprocal agreement between all moms/dads who bring toys that anyone and everyone can take your toys and play with them and that the playees will do their best to return the toys when they are done. So basically Isaac got to do his very favorite thing, play with other people's toys, for about an hour and a half, until he was ready to drop. We are SO going to the pool next week.