I was deflating the kiddie pool. Or should I say, the kiddie pool was deflating me.
When they say hindsight is 20/20, I think they are specifically addressing Wal-Mart purchases. In the aisle of their seasonal section that hot day, the big inflatable pool seemed like the best possible option. And those extra features! Oh boy! The inflatable arches. The momma dinosaur with inflatable head and tail. The inflatable toys. How amazing. BABY will just love it. This will make her summer.
It started to become clearer that this might be a bad idea when I took that purchase home. When I took the pool out of the package and tried to unfold the bright coloured plastic, I noticed those many many air valves in the various crevaces in the many locations on the pool. And, to make a scary situation even scarier, ten of my biggest and hottest breaths of air made no difference to the pool's lifeless state.
I got in the car with that pool in the backseat - beside the carseat - and drove to the gas station. I pulled up beside the air pump. Did you know that you have to PAY for air at the gas station now-a-days? Not really sure when that started or why. I took out my walet, plugged quarters into the machine, and started to get to work our brand new inflatable pool. Many dollars and rounds of purchased air later, I was craming an inflated pool - arches, dinosaur head, toys and all - into the trunk and folded down seats of my sedan, beside the carseat. As I slowly drove back home, I held my breath (that I still had thankfully) and prayed that the inflatable pool, now somewhat tucked into my car but not really, wouldn't pick up the wind and blow away on the busy throughway from the gas station to our house.
The memories were flooding back this weekend. While I was on mission pool deflation, thinking that I was letting out some pretty expensive air, I tried to calculate the time that my daughter actually spent playing in the pool. I tried to count the number of air valves for those wonderful extra features: the inflatable arches, the momma dinosaur with inflatable head and tail, the inflatable toys. I tried to map out where to hold and grab and step and twist to get the air out. I tried to count the time that it would to get it deflated.
And as I lay on my back in the grass, with my right arm reaching to the right and the left arm reaching to the left I couldn't help but smile. Can't wait to do it all again next year.
~ humps
