I get a lot of magazines each month, so many that I usually skim the articles in all of them. Once in a while something catches my attention and I read the article completely. This month it was an article that was published in Women's Day dealing with water safety and children. It brought back the memory of an incident with our family pool and started me thinking about swimming pool season.

When we got our family pool, the kids were 5 and 8 years old. It was one of those round, above ground pools. It was deep enough so that my daughter, at eight, could touch bottom and her nose would be out of the water. At five, if my son's feet were on the bottom, his head was under water. He hadn't yet learned to swim, so we got him what we called "magic muscles", those inflatable upper arm bands. All 4 of us were standing on the swimming pool deck that first day. My son suddenly jumped into the pool, minus those "magic muscles", and sank like a stone. While my husband and I stood there staring, wondering what had just happened, my daughter jumped in, grabbed her brother, and lifted him up so that his head was above water. She had been paying attention.

Swimming pools come with all kinds of issues. Safety issues are certainly the most important and I spent many afternoons doing my lifeguard thing. I also spent way too many mornings doing swimming pool maintenance. All of those lovely trees in your yard add up to leaves and pine needles all over the bottom of your pool. Vacuuming a pool is tedious work. I got so tired of vacuuming the pool that I introduced my kids to the whirlpool (run round and round in the pool and the junk all settles on the bottom in the middle). Then there is the solar cover. A pool tends to lose a lot of heat at night around here. The solar cover is designed to give you warm water all summer. It also gives you algae issues. If the water temperature and the chemicals are not perfectly regulated, the result is lovely green water, or worst case, nasty brown stuff all over the inside of the pool. I speak from experience!

My pool has been gone a long time now , long enough so that the lawn has finally lost that flying saucer landing shape where the pool used to be. There are many new products out there to make swimming pool season easier to bear. Nothing, however, will replace what for me was the most fun of the whole season. We never managed to winterize and close our pool before the end of October. The high point of pool season was watching my husband wade through ice-cold, gross brown water to the far side of the pool to put the cover over the hole where the filter goes.

If you have a pool or are contemplating a pool, here are some books to help with your swimming pool season!

The ultimate guide to above-ground pools by Terry Tamminen
Pools and spas: Sunset books
What color is your swimming pool by Alan Sanderfoot
The ultimate pool maintenance manual by Terry Tamminen
Learn to swim by Rob & Kathy McKay
Teaching swimming fundamentals : YMCA
Water babies by Francoise Barbira Freedman