“Mommy, will you take me swimming someday?” My number four child is so sweet. I have a hard time resisting her. I told her if she could get her school done quickly yesterday (Friday), I would take her to the Y.

It was on. The two little girls, 6 and 8 finished their homeschool at record pace. I had to convince the 4 year old boy to come along; he doesn’t swim yet and is a little scared of the water. I thought one teenager would be a good help, and I was surprised when my 17 year old daughter volunteered. She usually opts to protect the ‘do, but as it’s our hairdresser’s holiday break, we’re three weeks out between appointments now. Of course I wanted to bring waterbaby; she has the cutest swimsuit ever, and she really likes the water.

We got to the Y shortly after open swim began, and I almost lost my temper in the rush to the pool. I’d thought ahead and had the little girls and myself already in our suits, but just the act of dressing 4 year old and 9 month old was trying. 4 year old can dress himself, but he’d rather not, and then had to go potty, thought he couldn’t get out of the stall. .

So I walked us all past the shower, thinking foolishly that we could avoid getting our hair wet at a pool!

We saw our next door neighbor kids and their uncle at the pool right away. .. and a pool full of other people, many of them black. This is usually the case at open swim, now that I think about it; the pool so crowded that you can’t really swim.

But I try to have my young swimmers practice their strokes. My six year old kicked so hard above the water that she got my hair wet immediately, along with all the faces in her path. I urged her to kick underwater, and she swam much better.

The baby was content to be held and chew on her sister’s goggles. She was NOT happy when her sister needed her goggles, however. The 4 year old was reminding me of his big sister before she learned how to swim–”I got water in my ear!” and he kept trying to get out of the pool, despite wearing a cube and floaties on each arm. I had him play chase the ball around the pool, to his dismay, but eventually he got into it, and was actually tooling around the pool without much trouble.

8 year old was constantly checking how deep the pool was, seeing if she could stand, underwater stealth stuff. I asked her to swim breast stroke and butterfly, and found she can’t butterfly yet. 17 year old didn’t really want to teach her sisters the fly either. She wanted to play basketball, but there were a bunch of dudes monopolizing the hoop, and she had siblings to supervise, so she let that alone.

6 year old got tired of really swimming and grabbed too many noodles and started trying to make them into a raft. She kept going under them and running into people, and in general had a ball!

Before we exited the pool, I counted 17 black people and 12 white people in the pool.  And smiling faces all around.