near traumatic experience

that sounds worse than i mean it to. we spent the weekend (well, it's not over yet, technically) at the beach club / pool. if you are not aware, julian has been a bit afraid of the pool for a few months now. it's strange because he used to want to jump into the pool in maplewood.

he's playing in the kiddie pool (which also has a long winding slide), but not IN the kiddie pool, rather sitting on the edge with his feet in and scooping the water with shovels and buckets. he refuses to go in with serge. so finally he sees all of the other children excitedly running up the hill to go down the slide, so he tells serge he wants to go check it out. shockingly, he lets serge take him down the slide. only for whatever reason, serge was barely moving and had to keep giving himself a push to get even a teeny bit of momentum to get down. 

i decide i'm going to give it a try and take julian up the hill for a turn with me. i had seen another woman take her grandchild down the slide and she was moving along at a decent speed. when she hit the water at the bottom, she lifted up the kid so that she wouldn't go under and that seemed to work. only too bad for julian, i think i was going about 3 times as fast as the other woman (who knows how or why, i never took physics, if that would even help) and when i hit the bottom, i successfully held julian in the air out of the water until the force of me landing on the bottom made me slip, lose my balance and chuck him under the water. 

needless to say, he freaked out. 

we then went to the big fountain pool (there are a bunch of different pools at the club, including a ginormous salt water one) where there is a sloped entry going from 2 inches of water to about almost 5 feet of water. he played at the 2-inch part until he slipped and got in a bit deeper and face planted into the water again. that ended our friday at the pool.

was he traumatized for life? nightmares to come? 

hardly...