Is 3 the new 2?

You always hear about the “terrible twos”. Well, for us, two wasn’t that bad. I mean, every now & then Zachary will cry if he doesn’t get his way, but I think lots of kids are this way. He never really had tantrums – and definitely never had any in public. He loves his routine, but that could be either because we’ve had him on a schedule for so long or just because Josh is that way too. Anyway, our pool opened last weekend – it was very exciting since for a time it was uncertain whether pools would be allowed to open or not. We didn’t go last weekend since it was kind of chilly. But we decided to go yesterday since it was so nice out & pretty warm. Zachary was very excited about the pool. So after his nap, he ate his snack, and then we got him all ready for the pool – bathing suit, sunscreen, towel, fish boat…We got to the pool and he was still excited. Once we had gotten our stuff settled on some chairs, we were ready to go in the water. Zachary wanted to start out in his fish boat, which was fine with us. However, after a little while, we started trying to coax him in the water. He really wanted no part of that. So Josh took him out of the boat and just held him in the water. When it became clear that that wasn’t making him happy, Josh put him on the side of the pool to try and get him to jump in – something he LOVED doing last summer (he would jump in the pool for an hour – until our arms were tired of catching him!) Not this time though – he just stood on the side of the pool. It was hard to tell if he was scared (which would be odd because the last 2 summers he has loved being in the pool) or if he was intimidated by one of his friends from school who was jumping in by himself and looked to be a pretty competent swimmer for being 3. He kept saying that he just wanted to stand on the patio – we kept telling him that if that’s what he wanted to do, we would go home, because we could do that there. After about 10 minutes of threatening to leave, and Zachary insisting that he wanted to stay – and then not ever actually getting in the water, we finally packed up and went back home. It was so frustrating because he has loved the water in the past. I have no idea why he was such a big party pooper yesterday. I was really bummed – the pool felt nice and I wanted to stay longer. But Mr. Party Pooper made us go home. Is 3 the new 2???