It’s summer time and pool season is in full swing. On weekends the community pool is packed full of families with their mostly working dads, usually throwing footballs to their kids, tossing their kids in the air , and other typically dad-related pool shenanigans.
But there is a whole different world of the community pool you may have never experienced: Weekday pool time. It sounds pretty awesome getting to lounge around the pool during the workweek. Trust me, my dad friends give me no shortage of crap about getting to do this. It’s pretty nice, but it’s not all amazing…
Here’s the scene:
Most of the deck chairs are empty.
The lifeguard is trying not to nod off in the chair from a combination of the hot sun and boredom.
Groups of stay-at-home moms are clustered together talking to each other in chairs. They know that having other kids to play with means their own kids won’t be fighting each other for a while at least. For this reason I will volunteer to take pretty much any of the neighborhood kids to the pool with mine anytime…
I grew up a Southern California boy, and I love to be in the water as much as I can. This ends up being a bit of a downside for me. If there is one thing I’ve learned from weekday pool time, it’s that moms and babysitters don’t swim. Like ever…
If the moms get too warm they walk down the steps to about waist deep, splash themselves for a while, and head back to talking in their chairs.
That college girl you hired as a summer nanny? Yeah, she will walk to the edge of the pool occasionally, get your kids to pose for a smiling photo that she can text to you, then go back to her chair to work on her unpaid Instagram modeling career the rest of the time…
Thats where I come in….
Default Dad
I’m not their dad, but I’m someone’s dad, and apparently that’s good enough for all these kids.
If I throw a ball to my kids, about 30 seconds later the other end of the pool looks like the outfield of the MLB Home Run Derby, with dozens of little leaguers fighting for a pop-up fly ball.
If I toss my kid up into the air for a splashdown, a line of kids immediately forms next to me asking, “will you throw me?” Sorry kid, when your babysitter looks up from her phone and sees my hand on your butt holding you in the air, I’ll get to explain all of this to the local police…
If I get into a water gun fight with my kids, suddenly two dozen heavily armed kids come out of nowhere and I am immediately drowned in the water gun version of a Mafia execution.
Sometimes on a rare occasion I get to go to the pool alone. That’s when your kid swims up and gives me a doctoral dissertation on all the capabilities of his BeyBlades…
I once turned around and leaned on the pool wall after a kid spent a solid 5 minutes telling me all about his pool noodle, and even though I wasn’t looking at him or nodding at him anymore, he spent 5 more minutes telling the back of my head about it…
Then there’s that one kid that will repeatedly unload an entire super soaker on your head while his babysitter does nothing about it.
So if you think it’s great to not have to work a day job and be at the pool on a weekday, it mostly is. But if you are thinking of bailing out of work on a Tuesday afternoon to swim, prepare yourself to become Default Dad…