The thing I like best about the swimming pool is that they can all touch.

Not that this means I am off in my plastic adirondack chair licking a Jolly Rancher icepop (the biggest vice available at the pool, sadly–where is my mojito?). But I can sit on the side, in primo splashing territory for all the horrible little splashy children in their swimsuits, shoving the ones that don’t belong to me aside and saying jeez, kid, don’t get between me and the three-year-old who can just barely swim! Get your aged butt into the deep end, first grader!

It’s probably fortunate that, in general, the swimming pool is the closest I have to come to other people’s children en masse. Rory loves the pool, the delightful, exhausting pool, and she now loves her new swimming teacher, who she will allow to swim her around on her back, and will jump off the diving board to. All she wants is to move, this kid, to do more and more and bigger and better things. She’s driven, and she pushed herself to swim this week exactly as Lily once did—by throwing herself forward in the pool and kicking madly until she started moving. The pool is better than candy, it is better than naps, and it is possibly even better than mommy–at least, in that if I won’t get in, and only the swim teacher will–then yes, why, sure, she’ll trust the swim teacher!

In other news, today I had my coffee, my lovely lovely coffee–not just my coffee, but the one all by myself that I’ve been craving for weeks. And everybody did just fine.