Just about every day we go swimming in one of our neighborhood pools. If you have kids and are a frequenter of public pools you know how impossible it is to keep track of swim googles. Every summer we start out with one pair for everybody and somehow by the end of the summer we’re lucky if we have two.  Our names are always written on our goggles but they end up lost anyhow. There must be some alternate dimension full of lost goggles and stray socks.

This year I vowed that things would change. And I finally found a system that works for us. After about thirty trips to the pool we still have six pairs of goggles. That’s pretty spectacular. This is the backbone of my system:

A carabiner clip. You can get these at tons of stores for a dollar or two but I found one kicking around our junk drawer.

I have a cute oilcloth bag that I keep all our pool stuff in: sunscreen, dive rings, the pool key, etc. We used to throw the goggles in there too. I never really kept track of them so they were always getting left behind at the pool. (You know how kids take them off and toss them to the side. Hate that!) Now I’ve got my carabiner hanging from my bag strap and that’s where the goggles go. Thus the goggles stay out of the black hole swim bag and are easy to count before leaving the pool.

I take five seconds as we’re packing up to count the goggles and send the children scurrying off to find any missing pairs. Occassionally someone will have to dive in to retrieve a pair from the bottom of the pool but at least we realize they’re missing before we go home.

This sounds like a real “no duh” idea but sometimes it takes me a while to figure things out. Hope this helps somebody else out there who’s going broke keeping their kids in goggles!