Stay At Home Dad Week 26 - Everyone Out Of The Pool
I did not intend to look so solemn in this picture.
(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 37)
There have been different phases of this stay-at-home time for me.
We all probably have our different variations of them, but for me they went kind of like this:
There was - and still is - uncertainty about what is happening and what lies ahead.
There was a brief moment where I lost my mind and didn’t know how to handle things.
And there was also a flurry of nesting of a sort when it became clear that we were going to be home for the summer.
It’s that last point I’m going to focus on today.
I did a pretty good job, I thought, back in the spring preparing for the summer.
There was a lot of yard work preparing for a summer in the yard…and then I ended up getting the fire pit just before people started to go crazy for fire pits. We didn’t use it a ton over the summer, but that was really looking ahead to the fall anyway. I can’t wait for a couple of chilly nights to use that.
Then, in late June, when the really hot weather was coming, I went on a mission to find one of those inflatable pools that were all the rage this summer. (Not the cool small above-ground real pools that were also all the rage and I was tempted to get but decided it was a step beyond what I was ready for this summer. I am interested in and curious about people’s experiences with them, though. Feel free to share.)
I went to a few stores in a few different towns and I ended up finding the inflatable pool I was looking for…and then lucked out that I could also find an air pump on a separate mission to inflate said inflatable pool before air pumps totally sold out. (I was under the false impression that I could just blow up the pool with my lungs. But to my daughters’ delight and my lungs’ chagrin, the pool was larger than I expected.)
And so for the entire months of July and August we had a pool in the yard for the girls to enjoy. It was great. They used it a satisfactory amount, which is to say it might not have been every day but it was enough to justify having it and I’m glad we had it.
There were many summer days where the girls spent the day hanging out in and around the pool and I worked on the deck.
As you may be able to tell in that picture, the pool destroyed the grass in the part of the yard where it sat all summer, but that was a small price to pay for the girls enjoying themselves.
(And truth be told, I stopped paying meticulous attention to the care of my grass by, probably, mid-July.)
We had one last pool day with the hot weather early this week, and now it’s time to put that pool away.
Listen, it certainly wasn’t the fanciest pool you ever saw.
But it did the trick for our summer at home. And now we have it for future summers.
Hopefully, though, in future summers that $25 inflatable pool won’t be one of the highlights.
Notes
*I mentioned in each of the last two Sunday Papers that I had a good idea for a post and I just don’t have a good picture to go along with it. I put that off another week and I’ll probably just write it next week at risk of running another week like last week’s where I run out of week with nothing to show for it. They can’t all have award-winning pictures of me like this week’s.
*I did not think I’d be as excited about football season as it turns out I am. It’s a problematic sport - I see that and I understand it - but I still like it. I enjoyed the game Thursday night and I enjoyed some college football on Saturday (the college game and especially at this moment in time, of course, has its own share of problems) and I’m looking forward to watching a bunch of games today. I still don’t see how football manages to make it through without COVID shutting it down, but I’ll enjoy it while I have it. It’s easy to forget, when watching football, that there’s a pandemic happening. Hopefully those guys aren’t forgetting about it - either on or off the field.
*This has been quite a week, with the girls getting ready to go back to school (well, it’s remote, so I guess I should say “get back into school mode”) this Wednesday. They’ve had all of these appointments, whether it’s on-line to meet teachers or in person to get materials for school. It’s just weird that we’ve gone from having nowhere in particular to be for six months to having specific times in which we needed to do many things, some all happening at the same time. It’s been very disruptive to the pandemic routine in the house…but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This promises to be a better routine.
*Speaking of changing routine - after the heavy rains the other day I decided it was a pretty good time to let nature take its course with our little garden. The cucumbers are looking pretty sad. The tomatoes…well, there are a few on the vine but I’m not sure we’re getting many more. So, not unlike the grass I mentioned earlier, my summer growing season is over. I look forward to doing maybe bigger and hopefully better things when spring rolls around again.
*Composting is going great, I should mention. OK. Have a nice week.