Now that it’s hot enough on weekends, and we’re past Memorial Day, we’re finding time to go take the kids to the pool.

The Monster is swimming twice daily at his day camp, but there’s no reason for us not to go swimming ourselves at the JCC… and they do have a fabulous outdoor pool complex here.

We have the Monster in a floatation vest when we’re there – it’s not really a concern that he’ll get himself in trouble, since there are lifeguards and one of us is always with him – but he’s generally very good about not going where he shouldn’t be, at his swimming level. (They’re teaching him, at the camp, but we’re never certain of what really sticks and what doesn’t.)  Still, because of all this, he tends to mostly bounce around and go this way and that at random…

At one point, when he had protested that he wanted to go back to shallower water, all on his own, he announced “Go underwater”, and then proceeded to dunk himself beneath the water.  Getting this as a hint that he had things he wanted to do himself… I hung back a bit further, and stopped directly guiding the interactions.  If he had things he wanted to do, I decided, let’s see what he’s going to do.

And do he did.

It turned into this circuit thing, much like I used to watch the cats to at my apartment waaaay back when in the middle of the night.  He’d go up the stairs at the shallow end, take a meandering lap around the splash ground (what he did on any given lap around the splash ground changed up), and then jump back in the pool around the four-foot mark, and bounce his way down to the shallow end to repeat the progress.  When I came closer, he would interact with me if he noticed me, but most of the time, I was content to let him do as he pleased…

It’s interesting to watch how he’s developing a little bit of independence.  Slow and steady…