Now that school is out, my wife has a dilemma on her hands. She needs to keep an almost 7-year-old occupied all day. We have a few things planned to take care of that. We’ll go to Hersheypark one day. Bridget will go to day camp for one week. And we have our annual family beach trip.

But she’ll also hopefully start to enjoy something which kept me out of trouble and saved my mother’s sanity for many years.

The swimming pool.

I knew we would have to take advantage of one of the local swimming pools when we visited Disney last summer. Bridget pretty much only wanted to swim at the hotel pool.

I couldn’t blame her. We head beautiful weather, and our room was really close to the pool. Thanks to the life vests they let kids wear, Bridget would pretty much do whatever she wanted in the water.

For some reason, I knew the tiny wading pool we let her fill up in our side yard wouldn’t cut the mustard this year.

We haven’t had a chance to make it out to the pool yet with school and our weekend schedule. I know that will change soon.

While the thought of Bridget begging every day to go to the pool makes me worry for my sanity, I know that I did the same thing when I was her age.

I practically grew up at the pool. The part of Baltimore where I lived had two private pools that encompassed much of the summer activity for pretty much anyone I knew.

These weren’t country clubs, just your regular pools. It’s still hard to think back to people I went to grade school with and not classify them as Rollingwood or Five Oaks people.

We belonged to Rollingwood, which I of course thought was much superior to Five Oaks. Sure, they had a high dive, but we had lots more room to play basketball or throw a lacrosse ball around.

I ended up working at Five Oaks for a summer and a half when I was in high school and discovered the place was pretty cool. Back then, you couldn’t work at the pool you belonged to so it was interesting to see things from the other side.

Now, my nieces belong to Rollingwood and work there. That’s just sacrilege.

Little things like that are part of the reason why the pool holds such great memories for me. I didn’t participate on the swim team so I don’t have any medals to show off.

I do remember the bench where you had to sit when the lifeguards thought you had gotten a little out of hand. I remember the ping pong table in the pavilion here I honed my game during the 15-minute “adult swim” they held every hour.

I remember hopping on my bike as early as my mother would let me and riding over to meet my friends. I also remember waiting until the last possible minute to leave the pool at night so I could stay out late, but wouldn’t get yelled at for riding my bike home in the dark without a headlight.

I hope Bridget has these kinds of memories when she starts hanging out at the pool. I’m just glad she’ll get that chance.