The Beach and the pool

Friday is the day that Leah stays home from nursery, so when it was my turn to take her I decided to take her back to the leisure center in St. Andrews, called East Sands because that's the name of the nearby beach. (West Sands, the beach known for the Chariots of Fire scene, is, obviously, on the other side of town...) The leisure center is a wonderful British phenomenon, and as one drives through the country one will often see small road signs pointing to the local leisure center. I'm not sure what council structure is in place to pay for such things, but the fact that even small towns have a publicly-available space with a gym, fitness classes, community meeting rooms, and sometimes an indoor pool is pretty amazing. They aren't free...a visit usually runs about £4 per person, and so taking a family of five can get a little bit expensive, though there are membership schemes that one could choose, rather than the pay-as-you-go option that we are using.

Leah and I arrived at the center at 2pm, and since this is prime nap time for toddlers, we had the toddler pool to ourselves. There were two mums there with very, very small babies and both of them were sort of swishing the babies around in the water trying to get them acclimated to being in the water. Both babies were taking the swishing about very well, so I could tell this wasn't their first time being in the pool. Leah had a great time splashing about, and I'm trying the Bringing Up Bébé
French approach here with her--letting her awaken to the sensation of being comfortable in the water rather than the more American attempt to have her swimming from one side of the pool to the other, underwater, by her third birthday. 

After we finished at the pool and were walking out to the car park, we decided to take a quick detour and have a walk on the beach. This beach is much smaller than West Sands, but really great for little ones. It's wide and clean, and to one side where the sand meets the rocky cliff above there are all kinds of rock pools and water streams perfect for a toddler in wellies. We spent about ten minutes splashing about, and then Leah slipped off a rock and fell into one of the pools. She ended up with wet trousers, so we returned to the car park and headed home.

This last one was taken about 3 seconds before she fell in!

On Saturday, the weather forecast was calling for “thick cloud” for most of the day, so I thought the older kids would like to have a chance to swim as well. Rather than staying in town, we decided to drive to Dundee, about 20 minutes north of us. Their leisure center is much bigger, and it’s new. When we were here in 2011, we visited their center several times and were very impressed, so I was surprised to learn that, since then, they had torn that one down and built a brand new one on the other side of town. I had read some mixed reviews of this new facility online, most of which included complaints about small changing areas and cold water. I wasn’t too chuffed about either of these, but we decided to try it out on our own.

As we entered, the woman at the registration desk warned me that they had had some reports of cold water in the toddler pool, so I had really low expectations as we entered. However, we were wrong, and the facility was wonderful. It’s full of water slides and wave pools, and climbing structures that spurt fountains of water. There's even a wave pool, and a lane pool that had an Aqua Zone set up...a big inflatable obstacle course that bobs up and down in the water and gets so slippery when wet that no one can manage to scale the first hump. Plus, the water was perfectly warm. I splashed around with Leah for a bit while everyone else tried out the water slides. They came back with a full report, and insisted that I try them as well. One of the slides is called the "Cannonball" and spits riders out about 4 meters above the water, so I requested that they send me on the tamest first. It wasn't tame at all, though this might have been partly my fault. These slides all have "themes" so as you are sitting at the top and waiting for the little light to turn from red to green, indicating that it's ok to proceed, you get to choose from four or five themes on a touchscreen next to you. The theme will change the lighting and the music on the slide as you go down, and I noticed that most of the riders ahead of me were choosing "Mexican Fiesta" then sliding down into a pool of green light accompanied by the sound of a mariachi band. I decided to shake things up and try the "Fantasy" theme instead, but this might have been a mistake. My plunge down was accompanied by spooky music, and about a third of the way down, I slid through a blast of water so thick that a holograph of a skull could be projected onto it. After the blast of water, the entire slide turned pitch black and I had no idea when the next drop was coming. It was terrifying. At the end, I splashed through a pool of water with such force that my contact lenses almost floated off my eyeballs. Emma and John were standing at the end waiting for me, and so for about five minutes we all discussed the look of sheer terror on my face as I shot out the end of the slide!

In the end, the poor reviews seemed to be false, and the leisure center was a great hit. It was like a Great Wolf Lodge without the attached hotel, and full of Scottish people. And, in true Scottish fashion, there seemed to be no rules in effect about what or wasn't age appropriate. David and the kids wanted to take Leah into the lazy river but it was surprisingly fast and I was sure we would be promptly whistled by a lifeguard as we tried to enter with her. I even asked David to ask the lifeguard if it was ok, and when he did she looked surprised and shrugged, as if we had asked her if it was ok for us to enter the pool when we were already wet. She had a blast, and as we zoomed around the pool with her I noticed a number of other mums with babies so small that they couldn't have been more than a month old. Talk about an awakening to the water experience!

If you go, avoid the green one, or at least don't select the "Fantasy" theme!