I was very amused to see a mom friend in Georgia pose the question on Facebook "Swim lessons=close enough to a bath for kids, right?" because this is exactly what my kids think.
We are swimming almost every day and every night we have the same conversation.
Me: “You have to take a shower.”
Them:”We swam today. We don’t have to shower. The pool made us clean.”
Me:”No, it didn’t.” (Sigh, shrug, give up and go back to packing up the house.)
Our pool at home is salt water so I think they don’t think of that as a chemical like chlorine. I hate to tell them but the salt cell creates a chemical reaction to create chlorine.
And if you’re swimming in a public pool then you definitely need to shower. We swam two weeks ago a public Phoenix pool and they had to clear it for kids pooping in the water.
We are apparently not the only family with this quandary as evidenced not only by my friend’s post but also by a Google search.
So my question is: How far do your cleanliness standards fall in the summer? Do kids have to bathe if they go swimming? Do they fight you? Do you make them bathe immediately after or can they wait until the night? What if they rinse off at the pool after they get out but don’t use soap?
