Swimming

Yesterday, we all pulled together for a pool party to celebrate Seth's 4th birthday. It's pretty hard to have a celebration when the life of the party is missing. The above photos were taken at Seth's party last year. I love to swim and come by it honestly. Dad would swim anywhere - a pool, a lake (even though he was allergic to fresh water and would get a terrible rash), the ocean. Heck, I think he would even swim in a mud puddle if he could!

I have so many swimming memories from childhood that I don't even know if I can collect them all in one post. My grandparents had a little summer home in Donegal, Pa that had a community lake. Every summer we would spend countless hours in in the lake. We would use huge tractor tire inner tubes like floats. It has been years since that lake existed and even more years since it was swimmable but I will always remember it.

I also remember taking trips to Ocean City and later moving to Myrtle Beach. I remember burying Dad in the sand and Mom standing on the shore worrying as Dad took us a little deeper than she'd like.

One time, when Mom, Dana, Dan and I were in Pittsburgh we came home to a new swimming pool in our backyard! I'm not sure what Dad spent but we definitely got our money's worth out of it! We swam in that pool non-stop for years and even used it to bathe in after Hurricane Hugo hit and we were without water and electricity for several weeks. We used to love swimming at night and would often sing one of Dad's favorite songs, Tiny Bubbles, as we swam, danced and made whirlpools in the pool.

Later, when we moved to Charlotte and lived in Matthews Village, we would often go night swimming. Technically the pool was supposed to close at 10 PM, but whenever the security guard would make his rounds, around midnight, Dad would work his magic. A few one-liners and a compliment or two later we were cleared to swim the rest of the night!