First and Last Day at the Pool

Four days before the base pool opened, they found a crack in the bottom. Mind you, EVERYTHING breaks in super super cold weather, so it was no surprise to any of us that they found a crack. Apparently though, no one in charge of opening the base pool thought to inspect the pool any sooner than 4 days before it was set to open (middle of June). Of course, whatever materials they needed to fix the crack had to be ordered and none of it would come in time to open the pool at any point during our 2 months of warm weather. Soooooo, the pool up here never opened. Now the city pool in Minot is really nice, but it's not like we can just run over there for an hour before nap time since it takes a good hour round trip to get there. It also closes between 5 and 6:30 every evening, which would be the other convenient time to take Henry down there after his nap.

On one super hot day in August, we finally decided to go down there after 6:30 and just see how long Henry would last. Well, it's been a whole year since he's seen water and he was not impressed. We've decided he's a lot like his great-grandma, Mothie. She'd much prefer to sit at a safe distance and people watch. So after 15 minutes of listening to Henry scream while Matt swam around with him, we relented and let him do this:

He was happy as a clam! He could have spent hours sitting there, just watching everyone. There's this amazing toddler area that has slides and fountains, etc, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He wouldn't even stick a toe in the water.

He was also pretty concerned about not wearing a shirt, haha. Guess 8 months of winter will do that to a kid. But at least he loved wearing his sunglasses!

On the other hand, Matt had an absolute blast that evening. There was this HUGE water slide at one end that was apparently a ton of fun. And there were plenty of diving boards too, which Henry and I enjoyed watching him dive off of.

So that was the first... and last time we made it to the pool this summer. It just hasn't really been steaming hot this summer (and it definitely gets in the 100's most years), and Matt wasn't around on the few days that it was. I know everyone is DYING for that kind of summer, but just remember... it came after 8 verrrrrry loooooooong frigid months. Not much of a fair trade off! We'd like to sweat just a little bit before having to put our sweatshirts back on... I never even put mine away this year :-(