Day 3: What's My Water (WMW) #1: Family Pool 1

Hi Everyone...

Well today Alberto made its way up to Lake Michigan area, so I stayed home. Little did I know my area would seem to always fall in the clear strips as it whipped around this area. Didn't get much rain. HA!

I thought I would share with you my water from some earlier years. Yesterday, I went searching through all my pictures for those that had water in them. I have a nice stash, but I'm still looking for a few earlier than these two though.

These pictures are at my maternal grandparents house in Chicago. The woman in the chair rented the place upstairs with her mom and we just loved her. I remember she had a big Peanuts figurine display on her coffee table. :-) I'm the one in the blue & red bikini climbing in the pool and those are my 3 siblings. Yep, I'm the oldest. It says 1973 on the back, but I'm thinking maybe the next year. First, my family was not great on documenting pictures, so they may have guessed later and second, my youngest brother looks older than 2 1/2 there doesn't he???? The littlest...climbing on the ladder.

Well, this would have been one of our earliest pools and as you can see we are all having a blast. I'm laughing looking at them now! Not much water in there, yet we don't seem to care. Maybe we splashed most of it out though. Maybe that is why they left the hose there, because they kept having to fill it up! HA!

Now we are all enjoying the water not only because it is a very shallow pool but because my mom got us into swimming lessons at the local high school very early! My youngest brother spent much of his 2nd year of his life (from 1 to 2 yrs old...2nd year!) in the hospital with chronic pneumonia. We found out with his first bout at 1 yr old that he was an Asthmatic and allergic to almost everything! My mom wanted to get my brother's lungs developed so she went and had "a little chat" with Mr. Gilbert, the high school swim coach. Soon after we were all going for swimming lessons at some UnGodly hour in frigid water! HA! Mr Gilbert would walking around the pool the whole time watching us swim and sometimes you would hear him yell, "Great Job! You Passed!" and you would move on to the next section (type of stroke). I think I enjoyed it the most & got the most out of it. My youngest brother probably was the next best. I remember when he was about 5 1/2 yrs old we were at our town pool and someone frantically alerted my mom that he was up on the high dive ready to jump. She watched him jump from her lounge chair and said he did it better than some of the older kids. HA! Are you getting the idea...YEP, it is my mom who I have to thank for my love of water. She even got my dad, aunt & uncle to take swimming lessons with her, and though they didn't do great, they would not drown if they fell in the water. HA! I also recall at some point they asked me to be on the competitive team. I did start, but when they wanted me to learn how to do all kinds of different dives off the board that was just not for me. What did happen though is my folks also graduated us to a our first big pool...and that will be saved for a future post. :-)

Weather Update: Well about 9:45pm CST we got a Severe T-Storm Warning to 10:15. We got some lightning and a few big boom booms but that was about it. :-)