Weird.

My daughter has made a lot of new friends since school is out. Our daily outings to the pool exposes her to many different kids from around the apartment complex. The girl she plays with the most often is a family that has moved here from Turkey. I have decided that it doesn't matter if there is a language barrier, the screams of little girls are all the same, and in this way they are able to play together successfully, even though the only English I have heard the other girl say is "See you tomorrow!" and "Hee-Haw!" which is what my Westernized daughter taught her to say when she belly flops into the pool. Take that back to Turkey with you. You're welcome. :)

Today on our daily outing, we ventured out, the three of us as dad was home early, to the pool. When we got there, there were four kids obviously from the same family as three of the boys looked like triplets (i.e. they were all dressed the same in camo shirts and camo shorts, but they also looked like they were the same age, or at least very close) and a sister who unfortunately looked just like a boy...except for having long hair. My daughter timidly climbed into the pool with her dive sticks and started throwing them to the bottom and diving to get them. After only a few minutes, two of the boys came over and were watching her underwater while she was diving, without saying a word to her. She threw the dive sticks again and he came up holding them. We have taught her to share her toys and I definitely don't mind that other kids play with them, but usually they ask first or wait for the okay from the parent to play with another kids toys. This boy was grabbing her dive sticks and then started putting them on Madison's head. All four of these kids got creepy close to Madison and gave her no room to swim around. It was so very strange. I didn't take my eye off of her for a single second that she was in the pool because there seemed to just be something very different about these kids.

Instead of acting like normal kids and just playing happily, they were creepy quiet, watching every move that my "normal" child did, and then pushed into her personal bubble space.

Finally I jumped into the water with Madison to get her to jump and swim to me. She went to the deep end, jumped in and swam to me successfully. Then I told her to do it again. So she went back to the deep end and three of these kids followed her just hovering in the space where she was going to jump into the water. She looked at me like, "Now what?" and I just motioned for her to jump closer to the wall. She jumped again and these kids started swimming with her, crowding her out of her space. It was like training for an Ironman swim really with kids swimming on top of each other, except that they were only swimming on top of Madison because she was about four years younger than the others. We did this time and time again, jump in and swim to me, jump in and swim to me, and every time that we did this, regardless of who got to me first (which was usually always Madison) the other girl would look at me with her blank emotionless stare and say, "She won." Motioning to the Ariel plastic toy that she was making swim in the water. Weird? Yes.

This weirdness went on the entire time we were in the pool. I have to say that we were down at the pool on Memorial day when everybody was off of work and the rednecks were out drinking their beer and monopolizing the entire pool with their volleyball net and even then the pool didn't seem as crowded as it did today. I swear, everywhere you went in this pool, these kids were right next to you, scary close. I mean, I wouldn't even get this close to S-Dogg just to creep her out. It was so close. It was so strange. I got the creeps just watching them "swim" if you call it that. They more like floated around in the water watching what someone else was doing and then hovered closely to you or whoever so that you were not able to move around in the water. They were eerily quiet and the only thing that one of the boys said to me (as they were taking over Madison's toys the entire time) was, "We can take her toys, and we can do whatever we want with them." I was like, "Umm....What???" Weird. Needless to say, we cut our not-so-much-fun swim short and headed back to our apartment.

Not to be judgmental (but I am anyway obviously) but they definitely had some social skills that were lacking. I thought that perhaps they were homeschooled or perhaps something tragic had happened in their lives to make them so creepy. Perhaps they are just four little unibombers waiting to happen that will grow up and wear trench coats. I don't know. What I do know is that I don't ever want to be in a pool with them again. I would far rather play with kids from other countries. We may not all understand each other, but these Americans really give me the creeps.