What a morning. Saturday mornings at 11 McBean always has his swim lessons – or more like water familiarisation lessons. He can’t really swim yet. Most Saturdays Clark takes him, it’s her things she does with him. This morning she didn’t want to, so I was up. It’s always somewhat of a drama. McBean is a high maintenance high energy little man, and it’s never easy corralling him. More often than not he will bolt from his lesson towards the infant pool, and a life guard will have to retrieve him. Multiple times. It can be hellish on a normal day.
This morning was like a Shakespearean comedy, it was one farce after another.
We have a cloth swim nappy for him, so normally get him ready just before leaving home, strip him as soon as we get there and dump him in the water. This had been going on for a while, without any dramas. This morning, McBean does a giant pee in the car seat, so he’s completely wet before we even get out of the car. Consequently so is the car seat. And then the pusher that I have to transfer him into.
There were no car parks close by the aquatic centre this morning, so we were forced to park in the shopping centre car park and hike all the way back to the aquatic centre. In the pouring rain. Getting even more wet. Bear in mind that this is in street clothes, and I have no other change of clothes for him, because it’s never been necessary before.
We get there with just enough time to get clothes off and into the water, that’s a positive. But McBean doesn’t want to go to his swim lesson, he wants to go play in the infant paddle pool. So for the first 10 out of 30 minutes he was whinging and struggling and refusing to cooperate and just generally being a monster. Finally he calmed down and participated really well, didn’t run off, floated really nicely on his back for a bit, which was a new thing, and generally did really well from then on. Okay, so that’s a good thing. Instructor was impressed, commented he did a 10 out of 10 this week, which was nice.
As a reward we went to have a play in the paddle pool. McBean was having a ball, splashing around, eyeballing all the other kids, jumping on me. So we’ve been there maybe 10 minutes when he gets the straining face on. I was like ‘Holy shit’, whipped him straight out of the water, and sure enough he’d pooped in his nappy. Thank god I was watching him intently, otherwise it could have got really ugly. I race him off to the change rooms, and of course there are no family change rooms free, so I have to go into the main change room and keep him contained while changing him and myself.
With a messy wet swim nappy. Lovely.
And somewhere between the pool and change room it seems that he also managed to vomit a little bit, as when I flipped him over on the towel he had a line of puke dribbling down the corner of his mouth. Don’t even know what happened there.
Oh, all this and then I had to get him back into wet clothes, because that’s all we had. Noice, very noice.
I nearly collapsed in a heap by the time we managed to make it home. God I hope nothing like that ever happens again.
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