The Woman with the Baby

Yesterday I decided to take my chances and go to the Y around lunch time with my two kids even though that always means there's the chance that I'll have to parade through the lobby in my swim suit looking like a drowned rat to tell the childwatch that my child has farted and not had an accident like they initially thought. Can't say I blame them though for not wanting to check! With a snow storm imminent, I really wanted to make sure I had a chance to workout because, hey, I lost 3 pounds last week!

Unfortunately, since it was early, there were only two lap swim lanes open and both of them already had two people in them. One lane had someone who was struggling to swim back and forth so I did obvious thing: stand in front of the lane with my cap, goggles, kickboard, and waterbottle and try to give off "professional swimmer" vibes even though I'm not really a professional swimmer (I was a competitive swimmer for years, so I feel like that should count, right?) However, I was not alone. Next to me was a brand-new baby in a stroller (or carriage as people here in MA like to say). "That's funny," I thought to myself because no one there looked like they had just had a baby. In fact if I had to narrow it down to three people it would be 1) Me. I do look like I've had a baby recently, hey that's why I was at the Y. Seeing as my baby is only 8 months-old, that would have been pretty impressive. 2)Any of the hundred-year-old ladies in the water aerobics class. 3) The teenage boy who was struggling to make it across the lane. Unless medical science had provided an even bigger miracle than allowing post-menopausal old ladies to have a baby, the boy didn't give birth to that baby, although he could have been the father.

As I was thinking about this, the second swimmer in the lane stopped and invited me to circle swim with them. Now, that is a true miracle. No one ever invites anyone to circle swim at the Y. She was very fit and very bubbly. Just as I was about to get in, she asked me if the baby was still sleeping. Turns out it was her baby, AND he was only 5 weeks old! He also was her 4th baby. I almost fell over. She told me that "she was no stranger to the refrigerator with any of her 4 pregnancies." She and I had a nice chat which is also unusual at the Y. When she paused from sprinting across the pool a million times, I did a quick peek at her belly as I was doing my flip turn. It was perfectly flat.