And they let her be a lifeguard?

So I’m back in Houston this week to teach a water safety instructor class. I have to teach that course every 2 years, minimum, in order to stay certified as an instructor trainer. Since getting that IT rating was such a pain in the butt that I make certain I teach, and having spent a year and a half in Iraq, it’s time right now, this instant, to teach.

I packed up my office and brought a ton of work with me, because the start of camp is next Saturday. Well, staff training starts next Saturday, but still, I have to have everything ironed out and on the schedule by then, even though the first campers won’t arrive until the 1^st of June. Anyway, I caught a plane back to Houston, my dad picked me up at the airport, and then we met my mom a couple blocks away, where I all but threw him out of the car and headed across town to teach less than an hour later. Awesome parents, to say the least.

Friday night’s course went well and my friend Tweetie Bird came to teach with me. The WSI course is pretty involved and has a ton of lecture to do, so we like tag teaming it, for our own sake. It’s also great to see her again, since she’s here and I’m there, most of the time.

Saturday morning we’re back at the pool and had just put our class in the water for the first time. It’s an indoor pool and they were jumping up and down complaining the water was cold while I pretty much gave them a chance to settle down. We started swimming a few practice lengths of strokes they needed help on, and while I was down toward the deep end on deck, mind you, I noticed the lifeguard instructor who was teaching another class out of the corner of my eye.

Becky was giving the pool the hairy eyeball, which meant something was up with her student who was in the water. Then, about a half second later, I’m giving Becky the hairy eyeball as she enters the water. I make the split second decision to head over to her, stripping off the jacket I was wearing and entering the pool, too, as the back up lifeguard. It seems that she had a little lost Dory in her class, who managed to surface under the bulkhead, swim through the tiniest of crevices, and become caught inside. She could breath, don’t fret, but she wasn’t getting out of there on her own.

Long story short is that it took three lifeguards, a whole lot of steady, smooth talking to calm Dory down, and about ten minutes to get her out of the bulkhead and then out of the pool. Little lost Dory didn’t have a scratch on her, but she was quite hysterical for a bit, which I can relate to. I left it to Becky to calm her down, and I swam back to my class once the chaos was over.

Did I mention I was in cargo shorts, with big pockets, a t-shirt and my tennis shoes? That sucked big time, but otherwise everything went well. And heck, in today’s session, I stayed dry all day.

Oh, and Dory told me, “I almost died again this morning! I was coming off the freeway and I knew the light would be green so I didn’t stop… And it was red!”

Ugh.