The last month and a half has had all of my family shut indoors for too long, as I recovered from sickness and surgery. This week I launched my family full throttle into summertime as I endeavored to give my kids a "real" summer experience, complete with pools, Popsicles and play dates.

Taking three little girls under five years old swimming isn't quite as simple as it sounds. My oldest daughter, Aubrey, is almost 6 and can swim on her own for the first time ever. It's hard for me to stop myself from constantly needing to see her as she leaps off the diving board into the deep end and bobs up and down on the surface of the water.

Emma just turned four and her swimming skills aren't quite up to par with Aubrey's, but she doesn't know it. Emma enjoys the safety and buoyancy a life jacket brings, but it's not unusual to look up and see her life jacket sitting empty on the pool's edge as she attempts to swim with her older sister. My heart rate hammers out of control until I snatch her out of deep waters and either plunk her into the baby pool, or stuff her safely back inside her life jacket.

My 18-month-old Sadie takes after me, and would much prefer to lie on a lounge chair with a cold drink in one hand and a bag of Doritos in the other as she observes her surroundings.

I don't know if the sky has always been this blue, but sitting poolside this week, I felt like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" when she wakes up in Oz after the twister and finds that her life has gone from shades of gray to Technicolor, in the blink of an eye. Clouds seemed puffier and lighter, the grass seemed greener and the sky was only matched in brightness by the light in my children's eyes as we finally embraced summer and time spent together.

The sticky Delta air was oddly reassuring after so many weeks stuck in my house. The smell of sunscreen on my babies and the sun in their hair relaxed me even as I ran behind Sadie, in my bathing suit, no less, to keep her from falling in the deep end of the pool.

Aside from the constant anxiety of keeping their three little heads above water, we only had one traumatic experience. Sadie untied my bathing suit top while I was holding her in the pool, and my life flashed before my eyes as I passed her to a friend in slow motion to re-tie my suit and hopefully avoid a disaster of Biblical proportions. Nobody pooped in the swimming pool -- nothing kills a day at the pool like a floater. Nobody exposed themselves to unsuspecting strangers -- I take that back, Emma may have run naked around the neighborhood pool when she decided she was ready to go home, but my close call was thankfully only that.

I let my kids eat ice cream and Popsicles beside the pool and enjoyed approximately six minutes of uninterrupted bliss as they happily slurped away. I leaned my head back against the lounge chair and sighed as I felt the sunshine hot on my skin, giving me a Vitamin D high. I guess Dorothy was on to something, there really isn't any place like home.

(Robin O'Bryant is a former Mount Pleasant resident and mother of three. Read her blog online at www.robinschicks.com or e-mail her, robinschicks@gmail.com)