Pool-Time Deficiency Syndrome

We are in Janesville (WI) staying in a hotel. (Mrs. Occupation Dad has to attend a conference here and we came together, like we always do.)

There is free wireless Internet access for me, TLC's "A Baby Story" for my wife and a pool for Benjamin. "Hotels always have pools in 'em," he observed today. Good pattern finding! Maybe we better start staying at Motel 6's to give him a little dose of the real world.

(I wonder if we'll  encounter any exceptions to this pool rule in China. [We're told that the urban hotels in which adoptive families are set up are always pretty upscale. The more rural hotels — typically where children actually join their new families — are less fancy but still nice.] Time  for swimming, though? That's another story.)

Benjamin surely was very eager to use the pool this  morning. We went to the included breakfast thing in a room with a view of the pool. Benjamin is not the kind of kid who would (or did) keep asking excitedly over and over about swimming, running over the pool window and saying, "Let's go, let's go!" You can tell, though, that inside his head he's constantly percolating about it. He did ask a couple of times, "When are we going to go to the pool?" spacing these casual remarks out a bit. This didn't speed things up enough for his taste.

So, near the end of breakfast, he put on a bothered face and made a couple of humming, moaning noises, then said, "Well, . . . I'm feeling really sick today."

"You are?" we replied, wondering what this was about.

"Yeahhh," he continued pathetically, "but . . . I think going in the pool would make me feel a lot better."

We explained to him that you didn't need to be sick to qualify for pool time, that, in fact, it's the other way around — and that he and I would be heading to the pool shortly after breakfast.

A miraculous healing ensued and we've had no more reports or signs of really sick sickness so far today.