A date with Sammy

Yesterday Zoë, my husband and I all went for a "playdate" with Zoë's first friend and playmate at daycare, Sammy. The two of them were born about 2 weeks apart and were the same daycare class as babies. They shared everything from the age of 6 months to about 2 years and they just loved eachother. They were so cute together.

Here is a picture of them eating cupcakes at Zoë's first birthday party at the daycare:


It is getting hard to remember her being that little. They have both grown up so much and it was fun to see them together again. At first they were shy with each other, but they did warm up and play together.

Sammy has a swimming pool at his house and when we arrived yesterday everyone was already swimming. Of course, Zoë wanted to go swimming too and I could hardly deny her but unfortunately, I hadn't thought to bring swimming things along. Luckily Sammy's mom was able to help out by lending me a suit and Zoë a swimmy-diaper. The water temperature was actually about 10 degrees warmer than air temperature so it felt quite good to be in the water.

Zoë cannot yet swim so I had put her on a raft where the middle section sinks down into the water so it was like she was in a floating kiddie pool and I could pull her around the pool. At one point I turned my back on her for a moment as I was pulling the raft toward the stairs and when I turned around I saw she had fallen off the raft and was floating in the water -- head completely covered. At that moment time completely slowed down. It seemed to take so much time for my brain to process what I was seeing and then react. I saw her just seeming to hang in the water with her hands above her head and I had to wait for my brain to catch up and tell me what I was seeing. I felt like I was moving so slowly toward her in the water and she was just hanging there. As soon as I reached her I pulled her up and held her tight. She was fine, a little scared, but not at all panicked. She didn't even want to get out of the pool. My husband saw the whole thing from the pool deck and said it all happened very quickly and that she was barely on her own in the water for 5 seconds, but to me it felt like minutes had passed. There were 4 other adults in the pool at the time and I think only one of them even noticed the whole thing. That must be how quickly it went by. It was such a strange feeling to be almost in slow motion. I didn't have time to panic or anything I just reacted and yet it all seemed to take me so much longer than I thought it should. My husband says there is some scientific research on this kind of thing, but I don't know -- to me it was so surreal and so scary.