Baby Pool Reflections

This has been a particularly nice summer at our pool. We've been hanging out there pretty much every morning, in and out of swim team, swim lessons, dive lessons, water ballet, and lots of evenings of just playing around.
MPD and I, of course, mostly hang out by the baby pool while everyone else's activities come and go. Our baby pool has a gate that separates it from the big pool area, a zero-depth entry, a nice mix of shade and sun, and a big tub of water toys that have been our friends more many years now.
When we first joined the pool, KLD was our baby pool regular, WWD and MRD were just learning to swim, and JPD was a nursing babe staying cool in his baby seat. Compared to those days, this summer's been a cinch! Nobody's nursing, the lifeguards keep JPD out of (serious) trouble, the big kids do their own thing with their friends, and MPD's past that stressful stage where I have to sit on the edge of the baby pool ready to catch him if he topples over face-first. What a summer of bliss, now that I think about it! (No doubt that's a sign that I'll be nursing again by next summer, or--yikes--huge, hot, and pregnant--oh my!).
Anyway, one of the nicest parts of the pool this summer has been the pleasant Mommy camaraderie around the baby pool this year. I have especially enjoyed chatting with the moms who have been holding down the baby pool fort with me while our big kids have their swimming lessons. Every year, it's always a combination of old and new mommy faces, as the toddlers become preschoolers and then eventually graduate out of the baby pool.
Very few mommies share my tenure under the baby pool umbrella. The moms of WWD's long-ago kindergarten friends are way gone--tanning and reading magazines over by the deep end, or not here at all after they drop off their no-longer-elementary-aged tweens. And, of course, the shiny-faced moms now debuting on the baby pool scene with their firstborns are a decade or so younger than me.
So am I ready to graduate from the baby pool? Yesterday some of the other baby pool veteran moms and I were discussing the possible end to our baby pool tenure. Sad, we agreed. For all of us forty-something moms, the move to the big pool is coming, ready or not.

I do like being a soft and rumply almost-worn-out mommy, kind of like a long-loved teddy bear. I don't want to go back to my shiny-new-mom days, at all. (I was way too stressed out about everything you can imagine! Now I'm quite the opposite.) But I do love the laid-back, shady baby pool scene with its tub of pool toys. I'm not ready to move on just yet.