Ever since [Liam->] was born, I’ve had a low-level irrational fear that he was going to drown himself; I even had a nightmare or two on the theme. This concern was given a bit of fuel when we moved into a house with a swimming pool that had no fence around it.

In order to assuage my fears, we’ve made getting a fence up one of our priorities since the move. We hired a good friend who did a beautiful job to build the fence for us. We were really excited with how nicely it spruced up the pool deck, and how pleasant it would be to be able to let the kids run amok in the backyard without that concern. And then as we stood admiring it, Liam came up, took one look, and slipped right between the bars of the fence without batting an eye. Argh!

So, Kathy painstakingly removed each of the vertical pieces of wood and nailed them 1/2″ closer to each other — close enough to keep Liam out, but still far enough away to permit us to see the water. She was just finishing up resetting the last of the slats over this weekend, and what does the ungrateful boy do?

Learns to swim.

He made it about 15 feet without help of any sort on Saturday, and was back and forth enough that I have no doubt he’ll be able to recover if he finds himself in the water unexpectedly. It was nice to see the hard work we’ve been doing with him on learning pay off so handsomely at last.

Now, if we can only get him potty-trained…