It's not that I don't like pools, I just don't want one

For context, it is important to note that I'm not much of a "water guy." I took swimming lessons only because my mom made me do it, I never wanted to spend as many hours at the city pool as my friends did, and while I can swim to survive, I'm not especially skilled or confident in the water.

I don't hate swimming. It's just that I can take it or leave it.

All of which gives me great admiration for those who are very much water-oriented. Especially those who have their own pools. Whether they're in-ground or above ground, pools are expensive and, it seems to me, difficult to maintain.

But if you're OK with that, then more power to you. Enjoy the heck out of that big bathtub and/or hole in the ground in your backyard!

It's ironic that, of all the family vacations we've taken over the years with the kids, my favorite is probably the beach vacation we took to Delaware five years ago. I loved everything about it, except I hardly went into the ocean. I was perfectly content sitting on the beach reading a book about trench warfare in World War I (that's 100% true).

I've never jet skied, though it looks like a lot of fun. I've never water skied, either, though it also looks like a lot of fun despite the fact that I almost certainly would fall over within seconds.

I put boat ownership in the same category as pool ownership, by the way. There's a whole lifestyle that revolves around boating, though all I see are dollar signs and maintenance problems. But if you love it, that's awesome. Again, it's just not for me.

The one concession I might eventually make is buying a hot tub for our deck. Jared has been after us to do that for years now, and I might be willing to relent there. But someone else is going to take care of it. I got swindled into taking care of five cats many years ago, and I'm not going to fall for that trick again.

What we did right with each of our kids - Part V - Jack

(NOTE: Parents are forever lamenting the things they wish they had done differently with their children. "I should have been more strict about this" or "I wish I had let her participate in that." That type of stuff. I see nothing productive there, so instead I choose to celebrate the things that Terry and I appear to have done well with our children. Plus, it's a good way to fill five days of blog posts. So there's that.)

At the ripe old age of 11, my son Jack is still a work in progress. You can of course argue that ALL of us are works in progress, but what I mean is that, compared with my older kids, he's still fairly malleable in terms of how he sees the world and the values he absorbs from us, his parents.

Jack busts me up. I don't know if it's because he's so naturally funny (he really is) or if it's just because he's kid #5 and Terry and I are, in general, more laid back and relaxed in our approach to raising him vs. our older children.

I actually like to think we've been pretty laid back with all of the kids, since my wife and I are essentially laid back people. Maybe too laid back in some ways, though we've been trying to focus only on the positive in these "what we did right with each of our kids" posts, so I'll stay away from that.

So to wrap up the series, here are five things Terry and I may have actually done right when it comes to little Jack:

(1) We're letting him try a new family sport: cross country. Like everyone in the family at one point or another has done, Jack plays soccer. Like three of his siblings before him, he has done this since he was a kindergartner. But over the last couple of months he has started distance running through the Wickliffe Junior Olympics program, and it's obvious we've stumbled upon something for which he has talent and from which he derives enjoyment. Bingo. I have no idea what his sporting future holds, but I have a feeling that soccer and cross country will have a hard time co-existing in his life, and that he will eventually (maybe very soon) have to pick one or the other.

(2) We got him swimming lessons when he was a baby. A toddler, really, but still, he was much younger than any of the other kids were when they learned to swim. I think Terry started taking him to lessons when he was 2. I'm amazed at how well kids that age can do in the water, especially since I'm not exactly a fish myself. That was a good call.

(3) We exposed him to electronics fairly early. Like most in his generation, Jack is a technological native. He was proficient in all types of hardware and software from an early age. And while he often spends too much time on various devices, he at least has a sense that there's such a thing as "too much time on devices." He'll learn to balance it all out as he gets older.

(4) We taught him to be affectionate. This may be just Jack's personality, but to this day he still hugs us and tells us he loves us every day. I'll be interested to see how much of that goes away as he hits his teen years, but right now he has no problem showing the world he loves his mom and dad. It's sweet.

(5) We taught him to lose. Now understand, when he was really, really little, I would arrange it so that Jack would win most games of Candyland or Chutes and Ladders. You don't want to crush their dreams quite that early. But for the most part, when we play a family game and Jack wins, he wins on his own. There's a lot of losing in life, and I don't say that in an Eeyore, whoa-is-us manner. It's just the way things are. The sooner you learn that, and the sooner you learn to deal with it, even if it's just a seemingly unimportant card or board game, the better.

A day at the beach is no day at the beach

I'm sitting at the computer in a wet bathing suit as I type this, having just returned from a couple of hours at the beach with my family.

This is a relatively rare occurrence for us, you understand, or at least it is for me. I go to the beach approximately once a year. I swim in a pool maybe once or twice in that same year.

And that's about it for me, as far as water recreation goes.

It's not that I don't like the water, it's just...well, yes, actually it is that I don't like the water. And I know when it all started for me.

Like suburban moms everywhere back in the 70s, my mom made me take swimming lessons at the local pool one summer. It was good for me, and better yet, I think it may have been free. Or at least it was very, very low cost. So hey, why not?

Swimming lessons were given in "phases" back then. Phase I encompassed the basics, like opening your eyes underwater and reciting water safety rules or something. I cruised through that. And Phase II wasn't much tougher, though I'm not sure how I passed because I'm pretty sure it required you to float on your back, and to this day I cannot float on my back.

I'm one of the few people I know of whom this is true, by the way. Most folks just instinctively know how to float on their backs. But I sink like a rock. My wife is mystified by this, as well she should be. I defy all commonly accepted laws of physics.

Regardless, they passed me through both Phase II and Phase III in fairly short order, though I can't remember what you had to do to get through Phase III.

The trouble came with Phase IV, which was when they taught you to do the American crawl (also known as the "front crawl," or "just plain old swimming.") This is a skill I could not master. It is a skill I still haven't mastered some three decades later.

I don't know why, but there was something about the simultaneous need to kick, stroke and turn your head in rhythm in order to breathe that just stopped me cold. Couldn't do it then, can't do it now. I tried. Oh yes, I tried. But they wouldn't pass me beyond Phase IV because I simply couldn't learn the skill, no matter how hard they tried to teach me.

You have to understand, I was not especially well equipped at that point in my life to deal with failure. Not getting something right on the first try was foreign to me.

So when I repeatedly failed to pass the test to get out of Phase IV, I began to hate swimming lessons. And in turn, I began to hate the water.

The result is that I still don't like spending more than 10 consecutive minutes in any body of water, be it a kiddie pool or a major ocean.

Which isn't a good thing when you live in Ohio, where we have real "summer" for only about 2 1/2 months out of every year. When it's warm enough to swim, people here really, really get into swimming. And if you don't match their enthusiasm for it, they do little to hide their contempt for you.

The stereotypical Ohio vacation is to travel to a body of water and spend a week there doing whatever it is that normal, water-loving people do. My family doesn't take those kinds of vacations, and it's mostly because of me.

In addition to my low-level swimming skills, I should also mention that water always makes me cold. Always. I don't care if it's 95 degrees outside and the water is at bath temperature, I will still be cold.

Having lost a decent amount of weight in the past year doesn't help in this department. Previously, I at least had some insulation that kept my body temperature from falling into the hypothermic range. Now I just look at the water and my temp falls several degrees south of 98.6.

There's also the little matter of not really liking to have my shirt off in public, which I've mentioned before.

The only really enjoyable part of a trip to the beach for me is playing football catch with my son Jared. This is actually fun, or at least it's fun for 10 minutes until my 43-year-old rotator cuff catches my attention and asks, "Um, what exactly do you think you're doing?" And then I have to stop.

Other than that, though, a trip to the beach means, for me, being cold and making concerted efforts not to drown. This is not, by any stretch, a "relaxing" activity.

Which is why I should be living in Kansas or some other severely landlocked state, just so I wouldn't feel so pressured every summer to swim and fake enthusiasm for all things aquatic. As far as I'm concerned, summer can't end fast enough.