Lincoln enjoying the warm waters earlier that morning.
When it comes to children and the water, everyone knows it just takes 1 minute with your back turned. Just 1 minute. That minute has now happened to us. Thankfully it all ended well, but we now have firsthand knowledge of how it happens. It is scary.
We decided to buy the children water-wings while we were in Mexico. They are loving the water and swim for hours on end, so this seemed the obvious choice. On purchasing the neon orange pairs, I thought to myself, we’d better be extra vigilant from now on, this is going to give them a false sense of their ability in the water. I knew this.After a wonderful morning in the water with the kids, Shaun and I started getting our things together to leave. We were standing next to the pool and a lovely couple from Brazil started asking us some questions about the kids. We were obviously too happy to gush about how wonderful they are, and couldn’t have been chatting for more than a minute – and really I mean a minute – with our backs to Lincoln. For anyone who knows our son, you know this is a silly thing to do. He is fearless, he is fast, and he is unpredictable. Water wings came off, and a little boy full of pride at his new ability to ‘swim’, jumped back into the water. We had no idea.
On the other side of the pool, Erin and Marty – a wonderful couple we met from Texas, had been watching our kids swim, commenting to each other on how well they were doing and how tired they would be that evening. As Erin looked up, she saw Lincoln jump into the water. A second later she saw Lincoln disappear under the water. Over the noise and music around the pool, we didn’t hear them shouting to us. Thankfully our guardian angels were watching, Lincoln’s guardian angels – overworked and always on call, were there (this time in the form of Erin and Marty Chavez). Marty jumped into the water while yelling to us, and we turned to find Lincoln nearing the bottom of the pool and sinking fast. We dived in … we got him. He hadn’t breathed in any water, thank God, but it was close. It was really close. After a good cry and a subdued afternoon he was back to his normal busy self, but we definitely weren’t. It left its mark, and rightly so.
We weren’t negligent parents, we hadn’t walked off, we had given them the talk about not getting into the water without their water wings on, but obviously it wasn’t enough. As the Southern Hemisphere enters summer, I plead with all my friends, with all the parents out there, be vigilant at the pool. Don’t turn your back, not even for 1 minute! You might not be as lucky as we were.
