Molli in the Pool

I looked through the pictures from the Second Christmas Day lunch again and there really weren’t that many extraordinary pictures of Molli. There was this nice one with her in Lise Lotte’s hands, though—an interesting expression.

We’ve been dying to get Molli into a swimming pool since before she was born. Since before Trine was even pregnant with her. Since the first time we watched the parents in the baby pool with their infants at Frederiksberg swimhall. Yesterday we finally got around to it.

It wasn’t a lovely day. Here’s Molli, bundled for her trip to the swimhall up in Gentofte kommune. Not very tropical:

And here she is in the pool with Trine:

It’s hard to gauge Molli’s reaction to the water. We had her in there about twenty minutes. She smiled from time to time, but mostly she seemed to be in a condition of relaxed high alert: eyes wide open, head scanning from side to side, turning sharply at any loud sound. There was no crying or fear, but there was definitely an acute sense of curiosity.

There were no instructors on hand, so we didn’t dare dunk her or do any of the other hardcore water training stuff. We just bobbed her around and let her enjoy the feeling of the water.

We would have had better photographs, because we would have had more to choose from, if we hadn’t been told to put the cameras away. Apparently the swim-hall is a no-camera area because there were some cases several years ago of pedophiles hanging out and taking pics. By the time we were warned (we’d seen all the signs and had simply chosen to ignore them on the grounds that Molli only gets one first swim) we’d already taken about fifteen pictures and a couple of little videos—including one longish one on our analog video camera—so it wasn’t a total loss.

When we got out of the locker rooms Molli started wailing maniacally. Trine took that as a cue for mealtime and fed her in the lobby. It was one of the biggest, hungriest meals she’d taken in a long time. She fell asleep about ten seconds after being put in her carseat and slept without interruption—without so much as a twitch—for about three hours. The swim had apparently cranked up her appetite and wiped her out completely.