Sunburn Bad, Swimming Good
Today Yesterday we hung out in and around a nice pool with my nephew, his awesome wife, and my three grandnieces. They provided a yummy lunch and we had great fun. I haven’t been swimming in a few years. Which is sad, because it’s one of my favorite things and is exercise without feeling like it. I have wanted whatever house I get when I grow up to have an in-ground pool since I was a kid, even if it’s expensive and adds nothing to resale value.
It was Sadie’s first time swimming and she loved it. She seemed less averse to getting her face wet than she is in the tub; go figure. Between twisting around, leaning over the side of her float and trying (too often successfully) to taste the pool water (which she also sampled liberally by dipping and then tasting a finger), and sometimes getting dipped when leaning low if the float got a solid push, she got her face all wet and got it in her mouth and nose. This didn’t bother her at all.
For some reason she seemed to know what “kick!” meant, but maybe she learned that from the context of her kicking, us cooing and applauding, and us saying “Sadie, kick!” when she did it of her own accord. Which I guess must have been learned watching everyone else, or was a reflexive behavior. She liked the float, but she liked at least as much simply being held in the water where her arms had better access to it. She got a big kick out of watching Emily, sporting cool goggles, submerge and then burst out of the water again, kind of like peek-a-boo. She also got a kick out of spinning or otherwise moving fast. She’s not going to appreciate my reticence about roller coasters when she gets older.
Sadie had on ample amounts of SPF 45 baby sunscreen. It worked!
Some of us neglected to take such precautions (which, yes, is our own damn fault). Now, bear in mind I have been exposed for similar lengths, in similar conditions, and come out barely red. This was not one of those times. Ouch. Deb too, but not as severely because she used some of the aforementioned sunscreen in spots, and covered more with her suit. Yay Deb!
Poor Sadie. She resisted sleep vigorously, as she so routinely does. To the point she repeatedly started to nod off in the float in the water, and either jerked herself back from the brink (we can imagine her, a little older, saying “I’m awake!"), or woke when her face started to hit the water because she was using the side of the float as a pillow. She not only fell right to sleep in the car, but also slept through being taken out of her seat and carried halfway through Wal-Mart in Halifax. We needed diapers and a couple other things, so it worked out perfectly for getting aloe gel for the burns while we were at it.
Between repeated applications of aloe gel, drinking a lot, and pain relievers, I got through the night and it’s feeling much better. It affected my appetite. I made Deb some frozen fries in the toaster oven. For Sadie I heated up leftover shells and melted cheese on them, and heated up leftover summer squash. I ate maybe half the squash and until the middle of the night I was done. In the wee hours I developed enough appetite to have several Wheat Thins, some with peanut butter and some with cream cheese. That and I had a couple glasses of Polar Diet Orange Dry during the night.
The town made the whole cooking and drinking thing fun. Friday night there was apparently a fire (either that or they did some flushing on a different night and more vigorously than usual), so the water was brown with sediment. Disgusting. It took most of a day to appear to settle out and taste only mildly bad, then last night it got worse again. I drink primarily water from the faucet. Luckily we had some soda and we keep a bunch of bottled water in the fridge to take in the car, to waiting rooms, or in the diaper bag.
But jeez. The landlord pays $2000 a year for water for each apartment, and having it be too sedimented and/or swampy to use or drink is routine. Not to mention the total lack of water pressure. I recently found out that only 10% of the town’s water comes from MWRA, and the rest from seven wells in town. I thought it was all MWRA water, and that was why it cost so much.
Anyway, I digress.
I’ll post more pictures eventually.
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