My love-affair with all things swimming began as part of a package deal. The smell of chlorine will always be linked to memories of my high school boyfriend. You see, there was the relationship I had with him and there was the relationship he had with the water. Try as I might, I couldn't get him to break up with swimming. So I did what any love-crazed teenage girl would do: I threw myself into supporting him and the sport he loved. I watched lots of practices. I made good luck posters for his locker. I traveled to away meets with his parents and wore gold stretch pants (Blue and Gold, baby! Go Eagles!). I learned that 22 was a magic number for a freestyle sprinter. I held hands with him in the halls even after he shaved his hair into a crazy crooked mowhawk for the conference meet. For someone who was only a recreational swimmer, I knew a lot about competitive swimming: DQ's, false starts, individual events vs. relays. My life followed his swim season cycles. He was either training, getting ready for a big meet, swimming at a meet or processing and dissecting what happened at the meet and trying to figure out how he could improve for the next meet. Do not even get me started on tapering. Tapering came with its own set of bizarre rituals and rules. Still, I was in love…if not with swimming…than with him. Fast forward a few years. My first job out of graduate school was at a division three university. I was a hall director. It didn't take me long to learn that my hall housed the entire swim team. I learned this because I saw 80% of them in my office for discipline problems within the first month. Let's just say they were…rowdy. The truth was…they were cool and I liked them. I hated seeing them in my office for discipline. So I made a deal with them…I would help out with the team if they would stay out of my office. So, just like in high school, I started going to practices and timing at meets. I made posters and wrote good luck notes. I fell in love with their swim team. Needless-to-say, when I walked into my daughter's first swim lesson I was feeling pretty darn good about the fact that I had years of experience hanging around a pool deck. Uh-huh. I knew a thing or two, alright. I was more than a bit dangerous…I was a new swim mom with just enough knowledge about swimming to be darn-right annoying. I am a recovering obnoxious swim mom.