Tonight, Courtney and I went to one of her friend’s birthday party. While I normally find those about as much fun as dental work, this one was actually nice. For one, the girls parents are from our Sunday School class and there were others there from the class so I at least had someone to talk to.

The real fun, though, is that it was a swimming party in December. The parents had rented the use of an indoor facility at a local park. Gwinnett County Parks Service, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has outdone themselves with this one. It is a new aquatic center at Bethesda Park, less than 5 minutes from my house. More like 3. They opened that pool perhaps a year ago but I hadn’t bothered to go. I was expecting a normal indoor pool, but what I found was a kid’s paradise. The main pool is probably the size of an olympic pool, perhaps larger, and the deepest it gets is a little over three feet. In the shallow(est) end (about 18″ deep) is a huge playground with all kinds of things squirting water, many of which the kids can control. There is this huge kinetic sculpture in the middle of the pool that has all these colorful buckets about 20 feet up constantly filling with water until they get full and dump over into the pool only to right themselves and start refilling The kids loved hanging out under that. There was an area where rain was falling from the ceiling and there was a huge ‘lazy river’ section where a current just pushes you around a circuit. But the pièce de résistance was a 100 foot long slide that started perhaps 30 feet up and wound its way down, going through the wall to the outside of the building and coming back in just before the bottom. Too cool!

So, what I expected to be another tedious birthday party turned into a lot of fun and I got to go swimming with Courtney and ride a slide to boot. Sometimes you get lucky, huh?

/g