The White Whale.

I've never read Moby Dick (thought I bought it from the library for 10c because I feel like it looks distinguished on my bookshelf) but I imagine that many of the adjectives that Herman Melville used to describe the great white whale could easily have applied to me at the pool today. In fact, if anyone at the aquatics center had been reading the novel, I ran the risk of being harpooned. I'm not all that comfortable in a bathing suit in the middle of summer. Ask me to squeeze into one seven months too early (and a week after Christmas to boot) and I am so far out of my comfort zone I can't even see it anymore. But, my kids love to swim (Mason loved it, in spite of his face at first) and it was a fun way to spend a morning, so I rallied. And it officially kicked off my 2015 diet.

Teagan got to practice the skills she learned at swim lessons (and some skills she didn't learn there, like blowing in one end of a pool noodle and spraying someone with the other) and is so comfortable in the water it's almost scary. She swims like a little fish and I got to employ the skill I learned from her swim lessons: determining between a four year old swimming and a four year old drowning. They look eerily similar. There were several instances during swim lessons where I wanted to reach in and grab her and "save" her, but her instructor (who I will admit, knows a lot more than I do) thought she was okay, and lo and behold, she had been swimming. It's a tricky lesson to learn! We jumped in, we rocked the boat, we We had pruney fingers and toes, Teagan had distinct goggle marks for a while and Mason took a decent nap. It was a win.