As in National Lampoon’s Animal House circa 1978. I honestly thought that I was living a scene from the movie this past weekend.
Living where we do, we are able to drive down to either Grand Forks or Fargo, North Dakota, in just a few hours, to do some shopping. We enjoy these little getaways with our girls, get a hotel with a pool and spend the weekend swimming and shopping.
The pool, where we stayed, was awesome! It has a big Pirate ship with three different slides going off into the deeper end of the pool. There is a “kiddie” side of the pool which is shallow and has a smaller slide. As soon as we arrived on Friday we put on our suits and went swimming. We basically had the pool to ourselves and I was thinking how great it was! After a few hours, we changed and went for supper. We bribed the big girls with visions of more swimming after supper if they ate well and behaved themselves.
I was not prepared for what we saw when we got back to the pool.
Cue scene from Animal House, specifically one of the frat parties. Got it? It should probably be the Toga party that you are picturing since that will go hand in hand with bathing suit theme at the pool. No go ahead and throw a a kids pool in the middle of that party with a few slides and lots and lots of children running around, screaming and doing cannon balls. The pool area was packed! Almost every table was covered with beer cans. People were even lounging in the kiddie pool with drink in their hand!
I am no prude, but this was just all kinds of wrong. I think I saw more alcohol poolside then I have ever seen at a Frat party (I’ve only actually been to one “Frat Party” in my life, but you know where I am going with this).
I am of the opinion that unsupervised children and swimming pools do not go hand in hand. I am also of the opinion that copious amounts of booze and swimming pools do not go hand in hand. I cannot recall one time in my life where I thought, “Hey! Let’s get drunk and go swimming!” People, poolside, were clearly intoxicated.
Craig and I are very consistent when it comes to alcohol around the girls. We have alcohol in our home. We will enjoy a glass or two in front of the girls but we do not drink to excess in front of them. Clearly, not everyone lives this way. In fact we were in the minority this past weekend. The pool was so packed, that I was already on high alert watching my girls swim, I really did not need the added pressure of patrolling other children as well. The lack of supervision was overwhelming and blog fodder for another day.
