On the days when I think my kids are really badly behaved, all I need to do is go to our neighborhood pool for a little dose of reality. Inevitably at least one child (normally barely able to swim, I might add) is left unattended in the pool. That same child is usually ill-behaved.
Today, I took Lily and Arden to the pool around 3.30. It wasn’t very crowded. We all got into the pool and started splashing around. Lily decided to get one of the pool toys out of our beach bag - it’s something that looks like a bat (the winged kind, not the baseball kind). You put it under the water with your foot, release it, and it “swims” away from you. As soon as she started playing, a boy about 5 years old came over and started grabbing at it. I didn’t interfere - I like to let the girls fight their own battles, and imagine my pleasure when I heard Lily say, “You can share it with me!” They began to play with it, but then I saw the boy push her head underwater when it was Lily’s turn. I moved closer. He was demanding to take the toy and not give her a turn. Arden of course wanted into the fray (she probably wanted to scrap with him), and asked for her turn. I sat in the middle of them and handed the toy out to each of them in turn, but the boy kept getting louder and more obnoxious. He started yelling at me: “YOU CAN’T HAVE A TURN!!! GIVE IT TO ME! NOW!” complete with grabby hands in my direction. I had had enough, so I handed the toy to Lily and asked her to put it away because it was causing “problems”. As I swam away from him, he swam after me screaming, “NO FAIR!!! It’s MY TURN! GIMME MY TURN!!! WHY??? GIVE IT BACK!” I answered, “I took it away because you were fighting over it and not sharing. It’s our toy, and it’s time for it to go away.” I think I was pretty mean when I said it, but it didn’t settle him down. He just yelled more loudly.
Where, pray tell, were his parents? No idea. I never saw anyone talking to him, but I did see him attacking random children in the pool, ripping their water toys away, dunking their heads underwater, and generally being obnoxious.
A few weeks back, Mike was in the pool with Arden and Lily, and a small girl, maybe about 2-3 years old, was clinging to the ladder like her life depended on it. Turns out, it did. She couldn’t swim - at all. She had to be helped out of the pool, after her sister got her mom’s attention. She was busily stuffing her face while texting. She took her daughter out of the pool, but immediately resumed the texting and her non-aquatic daughter was back in the pool within seconds. Drowning, anyone? Apparently they assume the lifeguards are there to rescue kids who can’t swim Why bother with swim lessons when you have lifeguards?
Ugh. Just, ugh.
