Determined swimmers

If you know me then you know I like routines. Routines allow me go through my life with as little thought as possible. They allow me to keep up appearances. I would be a total disaster if I actually had to think about what I was going to do next. Instead routines keep things moving forward with very little brain power on my part.

On Fridays we go swimming. Today is Friday so I put "baby suits" on the kids this morning instead of regular clothes. They ate their breakfast at record speed and then fought over who was going to carry the fun noodle. (Only today the fight was about who was going to get to carry it, rather than the usual who was going to have to carry it. But whatever.) I took them in the backyard and sprayed them down with the spray on sunscreen and off we went. There is nothing I like better than walking through my neighborhood in my bathing suit all shiny and greasy from my sunscreen, but we got to the community pool only to find out that the water had been replaced with pea soup. Yeah... gross.

Tears fell.

We walk home, strip off our suits and get into regular clothes. Connor is crying and I'm feeling very out of sorts since it's Friday... we should be swimming. Now what am I going to do? I try to get past the fact that I skipped my shower because I was going to wait til after the pool and decide that we can head to Walmart and see if they have a blow up pool on clearance. We might still be able to swim.

Walmart does have a few blow up backyard pools left and, as I suspected, they are on clearance. Not super duper clearance, but clearance none the less. Since all the pools are in deceptively small boxes I have to look at the picture of the ultra happy family on the front to determine what is best for our ultra happy family. My choices were limited to a smiling and stylish mom sitting next to a pool with a baby in it, a smiling and stylish mom sitting next to a pool with a toddler in it, a smiling and stylish mom sitting next to a pool with three toddlers in it, and a smiling and stylish mom sitting IN a pool with two toddlers in it.

I quickly nixed the pools with the baby in it and the mom inside the pool. My kids need more than a six month old baby and I will not be joining in on the swimming fun if I have any say in the matter. I decided to go with the three toddler pool. It was more than I was hoping to pay, but I figure that a 7 year old and a 3 year old equal three toddlers. I don't know... this is the information I'm given to make the decision. What else can I do?

Ok, so we get home. I marvel at the tightness of the pool inside this teeny box. Honest to goodness... how do they get that in there? I find the holes to blow it up. The directions say to use a hand pump and that it will take 10-20 min to blow it up. hahaha. I get out the hand pump and let the kids go to town. 45 minutes later the pool is showing some minor signs of life but not even close to being able to hold water.

At the advice of my husband I dig around in our closet and find the pump for the air matteress. I had to make some adjustments and it wasn't perfect, but it worked. 10-20 minutes later we had our pool and after some comedic events we even got it outside.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich break.

Baby suits back on. Fights over the fun noodle. Splashing. We are offically swimming. Then it started raining. No joke. Big, fat, summer time rain. There was no thunder so I let them keep swimming. I had to hide my book under a towel and knew we looked nothing like the picture on the box, but who cares.