Zoey loves to get in the pool, any pool, but after about a week of swimming class, she's become a little afraid of the water. She still loves to go in, but now she prefers to sit on the steps--she doesn't even want me to carry her around the pool. No thank you. It took me a little while to figure out that one day in swim class, she put her head under water, either accidently or on purpose, and it frightened her. She "fell into the water," she says. And since then, she's only been to one swim class.

Ever since I've discovered this new phobia, I've begun taking her to swim as often as possible. We've been to a few neighborhood park pools, and I really like the one that's right around the corner. It's L-shaped, and the short end of the "L" is a 2 foot-deep wading pool. But the best thing about it, is that its stairs run all along one side. There's about 15 feet of stairs--it's perfect for a kid who only likes to stay on the stairs! Still, the idea I have is to keep her around pools until she gets over her fear of "falling in the water," and starts going back to swim class. It hasn't happened yet.

We're going to spend a week in Galveston this month, as my folks have rented a nice beach house there. While I'm not the biggest beach fan, I'm sure Zoey's going to have a blast. Plus, we'll get to experiment with letting her spend the night at her aunt's and/or granny's house. I'm hoping she'll do fine, and we can start letting her spend more time with them (and them her).

I've been taking a lot of pictures lately, working on things like composition and depth of field and such. It's about the only creative thing going right now. I still mainly take snapshots of people (mostly Zoey), but I've enjoyed taking my camera to some events and getting some nice shots of the people there. You can check out some new galleries on my smugmug site. If you're feeling motivated, you can even leave comments on some of the pictures to let me know if you like them or not, or if you think they could be better--after all, I know a lot of good photographers read this blog. Well, not a lot, but I know there are some out there.