Don't Spit in the Pool, and Other Life Lessons

Francie, age four, adopted from Haiti two years ago, is different from our biological kids. Duh.

It’s kind of like we were a family of labs who adopted a fox terrier. As the Dog Whisperer guy would put it, we are more low-energy and she’s more high-energy.

Grandpa got us a family membership to a local fitness facility as a group birthday gift. For some reason he thought it would be easier than trying to remember eight birthdays. The pool at Chesterfield (not its real name) is kid-friendly; big, shallow, with a slide and water features that spray and dump random buckets of water.

We’ve found that our teenagers no longer want to go swimming. Go figure. Sometimes I wish we had all six kids at the same age—turn time back somehow and make them all the way they were at age five. They’d have such a great time playing together. But at least the three youngest girls (one aged nine and two four-year-olds) do love it. Especially Francie.

Chesterfield has a nursery, and sometimes when we go swimming, I have to admit, we put Francie in the nursery. It’s not as mean as it sounds—she loves the nursery too, and she likes to play with the toys and the other kids. Putting her in the nursery means that I can leave the other girls in the pool for a few minutes and keep an eye on them while I sit in the hot tub. Francie needs constant, arm’s-length supervision. But she does love to swim, and after one time in the nursery she wants to make SURE that she’s going to get to swim the next time.

The thing is, swimming with Francie is real, well, tiring. She flings herself at the water like a terrier after a tennis ball, diving under, splashing, and generally throwing herself about with reckless abandon. Holding her in the deep end means she moves constantly, climbing me, switching sides, kicking. Swimming with her is an hour or two of repeatedly stopping her from drowning herself, and the emotional strain gets to me after a while.

Last time, we swam for an hour and a half. When we left, I found I couldn’t talk any more. My voice was gone—if I tried to talk, I’d end up coughing instead. I think it was due to the hour and a half spent I spent saying mostly, I admit, NO: “Don’t splash people! The kickboard needs to stay IN the water, don’t slap it down on the water. You splashed that lady. DON’T RUN! WALK WALK WALK. The lifeguard is going to blow the whistle if you run. Shut your mouth under the water. Don’t spit in the water. People don’t want to swim in spit. Get off there, they don’t let people sit on the walls. The fire hydrant toy is NOT a water fountain, that’s pool water, you aren’t supposed to drink it." And so on and so on.

Lillie, also age four (but turning five soon) watched Francie cavorting for a few minutes and then, peering owlishly through her goggles, said matter-of-factly, “Francie just loves to swim at Chesterfield.”

That she does. She loves to jump in the water to Mommy (so does Lillie). She can’t just jump, though—she poses, pirouettes, and bounds into the water in what is obviously, in her mind, some sort of ballet move. She leaps, she shouts, she dances. I follow along and try to keep her from drowning or doing anything that will get the whistle blown on her or offend anybody.

When this child arrived from Haiti, she had to be in the same room with me all the time or she’d start crying. She was terrified of our dogs, so she spent a fair amount of time on the kitchen table her first couple of weeks here. That way she could be away from the dogs and still be in the same room with me if I was cooking something.

A few months after she arrived, we took the kids to a back-to-school carnival at a local hospital. There were pony rides. Lillie had to ride the pony, of course, so we went over and got in line. Francie watched Lillie bounce up and down on the pony, and then she was ready to go too. It almost looked like she considered it to be a job; her face was serious, she hung on, and by golly, she rode that pony. If Lillie was doing it, then she was doing it. It was pretty amazing for a kid who, just a few months earlier, couldn’t be in the same room with a big dog without screaming.

Now, of course, she doesn’t have to stay in the room with me. Actually, we’ve put a latch up high on the door to keep her from leaving the house. One of her favorite things is workmen. We had water lines fixed in the street recently and we had to really watch Francie or she’d somehow get outside to talk to the guys. When we went out to the car to go somewhere, she’d wave and they’d wave back and call her by name.

She hit a little girl named Bella at Parents’ Day Out earlier this summer, but luckily it was just a one-time thing and she and Bella are now best friends. Now Francie marches into PDO and announces at the top of her lungs to everyone she meets in the hallway, “I don’t hurt Bella today!” She’s a hoot.

Last time we swam, there was a Perfect Family there with two children, a little girl about one and a little boy who looked to me to be about five. The little girl was wearing one of those padded swimsuits that means you don’t need water wings—perfectly logical for a one-year-old.

I was kind of surprised to see that the boy, though, was also wearing a life vest with his swim trunks. The pool is made for kids to play in. Our nine-year-old can touch bottom in ALL of it except the lap lanes, where kids aren’t supposed to go anyway. Even our four-year-olds can touch bottom and still have their heads out of the water in about half of the pool. It's one of those new zero-depth entrance pools, so parts of it are so shallow they just cover your feet.

Francie and Lillie run around, splash, and play on their own (no more water wings for them) in the part they can stand up in. We routinely make trips into the “deep part,” with me staying close and ready to catch them just in case, while they kick along, supporting themselves with kickboards or swim noodles. Then we have to stop by the ladder for a while so they can take turns jumping in to Mommy. They hold their noses, jump, go under, and I catch them and direct them to the ladder as they come up.

The little boy with the life vest didn’t seem to be having a whole lot of fun, there with his mom and dad and baby sister. Eventually he ended up sitting on the side next to his mom, watching the action. I used to be like that. I was an only child, and lots of times when I went swimming or to amusement parks or other stuff, it was on vacation with just my parents along. No one to play with, nothing to do.

The little boy reminded me to appreciate Francie just the way she is. I'd much rather have a kid who’s enjoying herself too much than one who has to be persuaded to try to have some fun, and who can’t figure out what to do with a whole pool full of water.