Every Sunday morning for the past month or so, our budding family is up at the crack of dawn for Water Babies class. This, initially, was something about which I was really excited. The lustre has worn off a bit, not just because of the early hour, but also because I’m just not sure if the boy is enjoying it. His Mum says that it’s during his morning nap time, but in order to keep him in the water we’ve got to provide him with a little rubber fish that he tries to decapitate throughout the class. Not the Water Babies model student.

Another part of Water Babies that I’m struggling with is the competitive Dad aspect of the class. All of our kids are far too young for their to be much comparing and contrasting in their performances. But I can see embryonic “crazy soccer Dad” in the eyes of some of my fellow fathers – particularly in the locker room before and after class.

I’ve never been particularly good at the whole locker room banter thing – it’s always about sports, girls and other topics at which I have little talent. It has been particularly tough in Britain, where I don’t understand most of the sports that guys talk about. Water Babies adds a whole new dimension, because these are posh dads. Dr. OC couldn’t abide our Baby Z swimming with the commoners, so our class is held at one of the most exclusive boys’ schools in the south of England. When you get a group of dads together, particularly a group of posh dads, the locker room banter topics are slightly different, among things like engine size of your Land Rover and the cost of your extension, a lot of time tends to be spent on the kids and their particular talents. Somehow, and I fear it was my fault for whining about the early morning start of swimming class, conversation turned to our infants’ sleep habits – a topic that allowed for competitive boasting. One posh dad smugly declared:

“My Jonty sleeps through the night once we give him his last feed at 10.”

A second dad, with the glow of an imminent one-up, said:

“Well, that’s just great, Maysie* has dropped that late feed and is sleeping from her dinner at 7 through until 6 the next morning.”

The third Dad could barely contain himself as he tittered and said, “I’m just waking Harry up for the first time since his dinner at six last night.”

I was waiting for one of the Dads to say that his kid neither woke nor ate except for the weekly swimming class. I didn’t participate in this particular pissing contest. What could I really say? “Oh yeah, well my kid wakes up every quarter hour screaming for his dummy (pacifier), he pissed on his own face this morning and he the only way he’ll do the swimming class is with a plastic fish stuck in his mouth. What do you think of that!?!” Posh bastards.

* Yes, these are real names.

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