Rachel was feeling pretty good by the end of the day yesterday but this morning her cold was back with a vengeance. It was 11 before she was feeling human again.
We took the kids swimming in the hotel pool. They were extremely excited by this prospect. (Everything is a novelty when you're five, or three.) It was 3 to 5 feet deep which was still too deep for the kids to stand on the bottom. But they got a real kick out of "swimming" with our help. They would have stayed all day if we had "water wings." Even as it was, Melissa threw the mother of all tantrums when she found out that I didn't intend to take her back down to the pool after coming in for a potty break.
When I was a kid, I was so skinny I couldn't do a dead man's float. The closest I could come was an almost-motionless back float with just my mouth out of the water. If I stopped moving completely I would inevitably sink. ("It completely refutes Archimedes," as Frank Gilbreth said.) Our kids are the same way: rail-skinny, without an ounce of fat. This despite our best efforts to feed them! The problem is they would rather ingest the bare minimum calories required to fuel playing some more.
So, I started teaching our kids to swim the way my dad did me, which was another weird damn-I'm-getting-old moment or three. I took Melissa out and supporter her back while she kicked and paddled. I encouraged her to get used to putting her head in the water. Rachel did the same with Matthew. Then I showed Matthew how to control your breath in the water which pretty much any non-back-stroke requires. He seemed as terrified of the water as I remember being, so I backed off. We had a pool growing up and I dreaded pool days because they meant another swimming lesson. I had a bit of a phobia, and although Dad's lessons ultimately got me over it, I wonder if it could have been done with a little less trauma.
After swimming we had lunch at Burger King, where our plans to let the kids burn some more energy were slightly foiled by one of those fool-and-his-money machines with shiny things and a claw to almost reach them. Matthew spent the whole time fascinated by that thing. I've tried to explain before that wasting quarters on those is futile, and even let him waste a couple of his own, but he didn't learn the lesson and I'm not about to let him waste mine too.
Naptime went well today; kids in separate beds, Mommy and Daddy next to them to keep the peace, and the whole family got a good nap.
We called the real estate agent recommended by the second counselor yesterday -- Kim Beckstead, who is googleable if you ever need a San Antonio realtor. He referred us to another agent named Terry since he recently broke his collarbone and couldn't drive. Terry listened to me explain that we were interested in properties south of 1604, then gave us a list of 20 properties, 14 of which were north of 1604. We asked her to show us the other six. She made appointments for four, of which we ended up seeing two -- the third was in a gated community and nobody could be reached for the gate code, and the fourth's owners cancelled the showing.
Then it was time for dinnertime roulette. I was in the mood for barbeque but it was not my lucky night. We tried three barbeque restaurants that our GPS claimed to know about. One was only open for lunch. The other two looked like they had been closed for months. After the third, we gave up and went back to the hotel and ordered "room service," which, since the hotel didn't have its own restaurant, was outsourced to some Italian place nearby. The fettucine alfredo was meh, but the calzone was actually pretty good.
Rachel's cold has added a case of eye boogers to serious congestion, which greatly displeases her, particularly since she doesn't know where her glasses are, and she figures her contacts will keep the infection alive as long as she wears them.
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